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Cottage Inn

A Well-Rounded Partnership

  1. Website Development & UX

Cottage Inn

Cottage Inn is a gourmet pizza chain using the highest quality ingredients to make pizzas, subs, salads, and more. Spread throughout the Midwest, striving to a certain degree of perfection is the name of their game.

Cottage Inn Gourmet Pizza logo

In 2023, Cottage Inn celebrated its 75th anniversary, a huge landmark that speaks to the quality of food it provides to the communities it serves. That’s not to say they haven’t kept up with the times — they continue to evolve over the years, whether in the form of new menu items, inclusive dietary considerations, or technology to serve their users better. From one of few chains serving vegan and gluten-free pizzas to launching a rewards app, we have supported Cottage Inn in all its endeavors to stay ahead of the trend.

Blue quarter circle
Orange line art
Orange line art

  • 89

    Increase In pageviews

  • 46

    Decrease in bounce rate

  • 91

    Number of sessions per user

Rising To the Occasion

Cottage Inn had great food covered, but we saw an opportunity to lift their site to correctly reflect who they are when they came to us in 2018 with a bloated site (not a side effect of eating too much pizza). This culminated in a complete website rebuild with a focus on clean code. The visual presence was of principal interest as well. While we positioned ourselves to provide all of the visuals, we pivoted when their team decided they wanted to control the visual output — ultimately seeing their vision through and ensuring we built it to the best of our ability.

Since then, we have risen to greater heights together. Their team calls on us for any digital support they may need. Through our continued partnership, we regularly collaborate on website upkeep, digital marketing consulting, and collaborative brainstorming to keep the dough rising.

Desktop and laptop computer mockups of the Cottage Inn Pizza website.
Circle Shape For Perfect Afternoon Banner
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They meet deadlines, even when we throw them some curveballs.

Jim Comiskey, VP of Strategy & Business Intelligence

A Tailored Customer Experience

Through our brainstorming sessions, conversations turn into palpable projects to better serve their user base. With the site rebuild providing a clean canvas to build on, we have enhanced it with every passing year.

So far, we’ve completed:

  • Website Rebuild
  • Location Finder
  • Custom Menu Items
  • Punchh API/SpeedDine Integration
  • Delivery Map

Upgraded Toppings

To accommodate the need to add new menu items, we constructed a custom post-type that can have ingredient and allergy information appended to it. To top it off, it’s easily editable by their team with no code required.

We then moved to help connect users with the closest location. Using Google Maps to take their ZIP code to provide the 10 closest locations in a live map and a list form to fit the user’s preferences best, including all the necessary contact information for that franchise.

This lead to creating a stepped process to better display delivery options. Users can see where to order delivery based on parameters generated from their address. After the user selects their location, this is passed through to their ordering interface so the location is preset, and they can worry about more pressing things: pepperoni or bacon.

As we rounded out the order experience, we moved on to the post-purchase experience. With many repeat customers, we worked together to craft a rewards system. We integrated Punchh API to facilitate this alongside their online order system, SpeedDine. This allows Cottage Inn to show their appreciation in the yummiest way possible.

Images of the Cottage Inn Pizza website.

Pick-up or Delivery

We don’t like to be cheesy (some of us are lactose-intolerant), but we are so grateful for the relationship that has flourished between our teams. As we continue to create a better customer experience, we find ourselves getting excited for the next feature on the horizon. Through this, Cottage Inn has felt comfortable leaning on us more and more for their expanded digital needs, and we are more than happy to support them.