Last week, Dominos Pizza sent out a responsive design email for the first time. Beforehand, mobile accounted for 22 per cent of its CRM-driven sales – following the move to responsive design, this rose to 36 per cent.

These figures were revealed by Nick Dutch, Dominos head of digital, speaking this morning at IPM Mobile Marketing 2013. Dutch also pointed to the fact that Dominos eCommerce sales in 2012 (£268.6m) were five times larger than the entire business was back in 1999.

By the same logic, Dominos sales on mobile – which accounted for 22 per cent of online sales in 2012, and has seen year-on-year growth of 125 per cent in 2013 – are larger, by themselves, than the entire companys in 1999.

So how did Dominos achieve such a strong position in mobile? According to Dutch, it all comes down to getting in first.

“We launched a mobile site and app two or three years before most of our competition,” he said. “We just took a punt, because we knew the customers were there. And originally, the user experience was very clunky, but we were able to take advantage of getting in early and build from there.”

And encouragingly, the brands mobile strategy is continuing to evolve. Dominos display advertising, which has traditionally been used to push sales directly, is now focusing on driving app downloads, where Dutch says it sees higher loyalty. 

Its also testing out push notifications from its apps, possibly taking over the role SMS has previously filled in CRM. According to Dutch, while Dominos has 2m opted-in SMS customers, the number of devices its apps are installed on is nearly twice that.