As I sit in downtown Cincinnati enjoying a cup of coffee as I work for 3 hours with jazz music in my ears, away from the hustle and bustle of our office, I can’t help but ponder, ponder WHAT IF ?!
Now, really fast on that “hustle and bustle” comment above. The office I avoid 3 mornings per week, so I can get some DEEP work done, was Me, Doug and Austin this time 3 years ago and now typically 30 people work out of that office daily. When I’m there is really tough to dig deep into work due to my teams needs, my own distractions and of course ping pong 🙂 WOW, just WOW how things have changed. When I bought that building in January 2021 It was to create a place I would love to be at every day (which I do), but also to challenge myself to build the company I knew I was capable of.
Ok, now back to the WHAT IF!
As we prepare to launch our new restaurant marketing platform this summer that will be a MASSIVE sales dryver, I constantly ask myself “WHAT IF” it did THIS!
And those “what if’s” are powered by the frustrations I’ve heard over the past 16 years of dealing with restaurant owners, from frustrations I’ve had with seeing how they use their marketing tools incorrectly and most importantly by the HUGE GAPS in every marketing softwar/ service that exists.
The UI, or user interface as you may know it will be so damn intuitive and easy to understand it will make you want to cry tears of joy:) That’s what I’m sketching out daily on this notepad, ideas and flows of how it will look and function when you as a restaurant owner log into create or analyze a marketing campaign. I want you to imagine this, 4 main funnels at the top of the screen: New Customers, Frequent Customers, Lost Customers & Loyalty Customers. Now each of those funnels is telling you how many customers entered that funnel the past month, how many spent money that month and what your ROI is. But more importantly, based on the sales goals you’ve input into the platform, how many customers SHORT that funnel is. Meaning, if you want to hit that #, how many people we have to acquire into each funnel through your marketing. And behind these 4 main funnels will be other funnels that customers are in, like your Birthday and Catering marketing funnels.
Ok, now back to my ACTUAL what if conversation I had planned for this blog…
WHAT IF you could log into a marketing platform and create a campaign for a VERY specific segment of your database and NOT bother people who are already in a funnel? Meaning if Matt Plapp is a loyalty customer who’s going to get a Smart Offer promotion that week, he does not need to be in your new “one-off” campaign you’re creating today.
Let’s examine where this idea comes from for me and hopefully you’ll share my excitement for this restaurant marketing WHAT IF!
Every week I get emails that don’t relate to me. And in many instances I get multiple emails and texts from the same restaurant. Now I’m all for marketing to your list, but you MUST protect your list (insert Under Armor Commercial… WE MUST PROTECT THIS HOUSE).
You must treat it with care and not abuse it. Let’s be honest with each other, as much as we each love sending our stuff, customers don’t give a shit often. So when you over market to people they go away, and you lose their attention.
On top of that, everyone doesn’t need to know everything about your restaurant and they really only need to hear from you about 20-30 times per year. So if we have these funnels created to cover our core 4 main customers (new, lost, frequent and loyalty) and our other lower level funnels, that means that aprox half of your list should already be in a marketing funnel every other week. In fact my personal goal for our new platform is for 3.5% of the database to be in a marketing funnel EVERY DAY. That means that as a customer in a restaurants database I’d get a pre-determined marketing campaign 100% based off of my journey with your restaurant. If a restaurant has a 10,000 customer database (which is the MINIMUM you all should have after 2 years in business), then 350 customers are getting a message each day and you’re touching the entire database monthly.
That means when you log in weekly to do something “one off” you can talk to the others. This is my BIG WHAT IF. I want our platform to have a filter set up that excludes anyone in the database that’s already in a funnel campaign inside of a 7 day window. Meaning if Matt Plapp is getting a WIN BACK email in 4 days because I’ve went MIA the past 2 weeks, then I won’t get your Father’s Day Campaign.
This will PROTECT YOUR LIST! WATCH THIS is you don’t know the UA reference
The great part is, a lot of this work is already done! You see, my good friends Kamron Karington and Joe Gratz had these same thoughts MANY years ago while creating Repeat Returns. This is what made it so easy to acquire Repeat Returns, it had many of my wish list items in it.
As an example, below is the current version of the daily marketing calendar that’s FED by the existing marketing funnels. In this example about 5% of the restaurants database of 2,500 are getting a message today BASED 100% on their journey.
The next part of the journey for this Marketing Calendar is to tie in a few new funnels, tweak a few of their funnels and then build a more robust filtering system.
As you can see below, we can filter based off of MANY customer tags now. My goal is to for restaurant owners to have more choices here and then to be able to choose a few of these tags to create a very specific audience for a marketing campaign while NOT interrupting the customers who will get a message already.
As an example, National Dog Day . Let’s say a restaurant is doing a contest where customers comment on a Facebook Post with picture of their dog in the comment LIKE THIS ONE CLICK HERE.
So on top of making that Facebook post you want to email or text some customers. But of course I don’t want to send it to everyone (and the system won’t let me either), but I want to drive some solid traffic to it. So I could log into the platform, choose create a marketing campaign. Choose my mediums, email, text and messenger. Then choose my audience, say customers who’ve visited in the past month who are also in my top 25% of spenders lifetime. This gives me a very good audience and that’s who’s likely to interact with such a targeted post. Then it’s as simple as taking my image I created for Facebook and popping it into the template, adding 1 line of text like ” Do you have a dog? If so, we’re having a contest, click below to go to Facebook and comment for a chance to win.”
My goal of this audience would be to give you 300-500 customers to choose from every time. That way you have a large enough audience to choose from, while not bugging your entire potential audience every time you do a 1-off promo like this.
That my friends is ONE of my many WHAT IFs
Stay tuned, an announcement and CONTEST is coming soon for our new restaurant marketing platform that’s going to become your #1 dryver of sales!
