Overview

Pizza Pilgrims is a much-loved pizzeria brand known for bringing proper Neapolitan pizza to neighbourhoods across the UK. With a strong focus on community, creativity and guest experience, the brand continues to grow at pace.

As the business has scaled, so has its ambition to build stronger, longer-lasting relationships with its guests. Pizza Pilgrims partners with Stampede to grow and activate its CRM database, unify guest data, and drive measurable return visits through intelligent, automated marketing.

Today, Pizza Pilgrims has 28 venues and a CRM database of over 300,000 contacts, powered by Stampede.

The Challenge

Before moving to Stampede in 2024, Pizza Pilgrims had been using a well-known CRM and email platform that was originally introduced during Covid to support their home pizza kit offering. As the business shifted its focus back to driving growth across its restaurants, the platform no longer aligned with their evolving priorities.

A number of challenges began to emerge:

• The system wasn’t built with a brand-first approach in mind, limiting the team’s ability to fully express Pizza Pilgrims’ distinctive tone and personality across campaigns.

• As their database expanded, costs scaled quickly, with pricing closely linked to contact volume (making growth increasingly expensive).

• And while the platform had worked well for e-commerce, it wasn’t designed to drive repeat visits or support local engagement across a growing brand of restaurant locations.

As Pizza Pilgrims continued to expand, it became clear they needed a solution purpose-built for hospitality growth.

The Solution

Pizza Pilgrims chose Stampede as a long-term growth partner, not just a software provider, for their marketing & CRM and guest Wi-Fi.

“Pizza Pilgrims always look for suppliers and partners we can grow with. Working with Stampede is a very open dialogue. If we have a business problem, I can ask: can we solve this with the current functionality we have now, or can we put something on the roadmap for a future update?” ~ Theo Rogers, Digital Lead, Pizza Pilgrims

That collaborative approach is matched by the pace of product development.

“You can sense things changing in the Stampede platform weekly and monthly, which is always nice.”

Intuitive, Repeatable Campaign Execution

Having used many leading CRM and email platforms previously, the team found Stampede markedly easier to use.

“I’ve used all the popular email and CRM marketing software, and Stampede is by far the easiest to use. It feels really intuitive. Once you’ve got templates set up, it feels very repeatable.”

They find the drag-and-drop campaign builder simplifies execution, while the recent interface improvements have added confidence at scale.

In 2025 alone, Pizza Pilgrims delivered 3.26 million emails with an average open rate of 29.4%, driving over 105,000 unique return visits from email campaigns.

Guest Wi-Fi: A Game-Changer for Data & Attribution

Stampede Guest Wi-Fi has become a key growth lever too.

“Guest Wi-Fi has been a game-changer for us. It’s another way to track and attribute whether campaigns have been successful, and also grow those databases.”

With limitations around third-party booking data, Wi-Fi provides a reliable secondary data stream and a powerful automation trigger.

The result is a rapidly growing, high-value database of over 300,000 guests.

With that scale established, the team is now focused on gathering deeper insight:

“We’re looking forward to taking advantage of more of the Guest Wi-Fi capabilities like surveys and upsell cards. Now that we have a large database, it would be great to gather more data points so we can segment deeper and provide even more relevant communication.”

Coming Up

Looking ahead to the rest of 2026, Pizza Pilgrims plans to lean further into localised and behaviour-driven marketing.

They want to focus more on local marketing and create unique workflows: whether that’s for people who sign up for new venue openings, their catering offer, or lapsed customers in certain regions and pizzerias.

With a strong foundation in place and a clear return on investment, the next phase is about unlocking even more opportunity from the platform.