Day 173 – The Puzzle – Restaurant Birthday Marketing Is A Gold Mine!

Yesterday, I got the email above through our DRYVER Platform for one of our clients, Super Smokers.

Now, before you text me Happy Birthday, it’s not really my BDay 🙂  I sign up for clients’ programs as they launch and put a date about a month out so I can see what we are doing for them right away versus waiting.  

When I saw this email, I was excited; the graphics really got my attention.  What you can’t see above is that this image is a GIF with movement.  The smoke you see coming up from the left is actual smoke in motion.  It’s so freaking cool!  There’s also movement with the text boxes; it’s an attention-getter.  

Today, I want to talk about Birthday marketing, but first, I must set the stage

What we are building with the DRYVER Restaurant Marketing Platform is a 3-prong attack:

1st – High-level intuitive marketing software that takes customers on a journey based on where they are in the marketing funnel; in this case, it would be my birthday.  I want to create the industry’s first customer management software that ensures your restaurant’s customers are actively marketed to, so we can DRIVE sales every week. 

2nd –  Customer Acquisition – We must help you create a constant stream of customers joining your marketing programs, like this restaurant’s Birthday program.  If you don’t have acquisition marketing daily, you’re letting a Ferrari sit there and run out of gas.  Most restaurants use their POS or online ordering as a crutch to fuel the growth of things like their Loyalty program.  The problem is that you run out of customers, and the momentum dies.  You must leverage paid Facebook and Instagram ads and in-store marketing to fill the fuel tank. 

3rd – Expert advice!  DRYVER will not be a “set it and forget it” marketing program like so many technology companies have become.  You will have someone on our team giving you expert advice and helping you build marketing programs that DRIVE SALES!

Now, onto my Birthday marketing idea

How many people live within 5 miles of your restaurant?  I wanted to do a little experiment on this for my team.  I googled the population of the three cities around me, thinking if I owned a casual dining restaurant in Florence, Kentucky, what would my potential “Birthday Reach” be daily?  

Florence = 32,618

Erlanger = 19,756

Burlington = 18,264

Union = 7,592

The total population came to 78,230 people.  Now, I know it’s not going to be exact, but assuming we split this up by 365 days, that means 214 people have a birthday EVERY DAY!

Birthdays are great for restaurants.  Casual dining concepts will benefit more than most.  So imagine if a restaurant in Florence, Kentucky, did the following for three years in a row

1st – Asked EVERY customer who walked into their restaurant to join their birthday program excitedly!

2nd – Had a system like DRYVER to use in step #1 🙂

3rd – Took the system “like DRYVER” and connected it to their website, online ordering, and restaurant point of sale.  

4th – Ran paid ads, $10 per day, targeting consumers with a birthday that month. 

5th – Used organic social media to celebrate customers on their birthdays.  Pull out your smartphone and film a video or take a picture of you giving them their gift.  Then, drop a link in the post description so viewers can join.

6th – Lastly, pick up the phone and call every customer in your system (like DRYVER) to wish them a happy birthday.  Plus, to remind them that you’d love to see their smiling face in the restaurant, taking advantage of their FREE birthday gift. 

What if, over those three years, you got 5% of the birthdays to visit?  That would be 11 people per day.  

Scratch that, what if you got 1% ?  

If ONLY two people came into your restaurant daily for their birthday, based on the stats in our system, they’d bring with them three other customers, and you’d have a $50-75 check average.  

You’d have around $35,000 in gross sales and approx $25,000 in incremental profit.  This means you would add $2,000 per month to YOUR PAY CHECK!

And this is only assuming a few people take advantage of it each day.  Imagine if you get what you should get, many more.  Also, imagine if this birthday program was simply one of ten marketing programs running daily.

IMAGINE

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