If your restaurant wants to increase loyalty and keep guests coming back again and again, personalized messaging needs to be one of your key marketing strategies. In this day and age, consumers don’t just expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, they actually get frustrated when it doesn't happen. And beyond meeting expectations, personalization can have big benefits to your bottom line, as well.
According to Adentro, emails that incorporated personalized messaging based on customer visit data saw an average open rate of 26.6%, compared to a 19.4% open rate for emails without personalization. What’s more is that personalized emails also drove almost three times more walk-throughs than mass emails, which also means three times the sales.
While personalized marketing has been proven to deliver positive results for businesses across all industries, the challenge is that it's not always easy to implement. There are three main components to successful personalization: the right customer, the right content, and the right time, which means that in reality, personalization all starts with customer data. The steps in this article will help you:
- Build your database so you can target the right customers
- Collect visit data so you can create the right content
- Employ automation so you can send at the right time
Step 1. Build Your Database
Before you can start sending personalized messaging to your database, you need to build your database. Consider the pen and paper or fishbowl method that some restaurants use to collect customer contacts: not only does this method require manual entry on your part, leaving room for human error, but there will likely also be a delay as to when the data gets input into your CRM.
Instead, leverage a value exchange like a guest WiFi access sign-on or loyalty program, which captures the customer's email and immediately gets their information into your database for real-time marketing use.
Some additional ways to collect guest emails include:
● A subscription form on your restaurant website
● Your reservations page
● Via a link on your restaurant's social pages
● On questionnaires or feedback forms
Step 2. Collect Visit Data
To develop personalized marketing campaigns, restaurants need to segment their guest list, and one of the most relevant criteria for segmentation is visit data. Understanding if a customer has only visited once versus multiple visits can give marketers a sense of what the goal of the communication is, and therefore craft the message appropriately to achieve said goal. For example, if based on visit data you know that a loyal customer hasn’t visited in the past 60 days, you may consider surfacing an incentive to them to drive them back into your location.
While traditional visit data largely focused on the number of visits a customer made, modern day visit data has become much more robust, even featuring information like visit recency, visit day of week, visit time of day, and how long they stayed. Attaching this type of data to guest profiles in a marketing database helps restaurants understand the different segments of guests, making it easier to employ specific messaging and campaigns to reach them.
Time of day and day of week can be particularly valuable for restaurants considering the variation between guests who dine mid-week for lunch versus a happy hour guest. Chances are, these customers will respond differently to different promotions. A BOGO drink coupon would be appealing to the happy hour guest, whereas a discounted appetizer coupon may be more appealing to the lunch guest. Having the ability to create segments and craft messages like these is guaranteed to increase the effectiveness of your emails, but the trick is also being able to do this at scale.
Step 3. Employ Automation Tools
The last step to capitalize on personalization is to automate your personalized emails based on visit behavior. Email automation tools allow you to send hyper-relevant messages at the most optimal times, which helps you maintain customer relationships without a lot of internal lift on your end.
How exactly does this type of email automation work? Let’s say you want to launch a campaign to bring back first-time guests within the next 30 days. This is a breeze if you’re tracking guest visit data. By feeding this data to an email automation tool, you can trigger emails to send after their first visit, and again before the 30 days has lapsed. The best part? All you have to do is set up these emails once and let automation do its job.
Some additional automation ideas include:
● Asking for feedback after a guest’s first visit
● Thanking a guest for returning or visiting during a particular event
● Loyalty program updates
● Wishing guests Happy Birthday or Happy Anniversary
Megan Wintersteen is the Vice President of Marketing at Adentro, a visit-based marketing platform that gives restaurant operators the tools to see success. She is hosting a conference session today entitled “Why Customer Visit Data is Your Golden Ticket to Higher Sales”.
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