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

Day 171 – The Puzzle – Your Restaurants Tech

Tech has to be your friend, especially if you own a restaurant in 2024.  

This past weekend, I saw this front and center at Texas Roadhouse. One of the most significant issues busy sit-down restaurants face is being unable to track down their servers, especially when it comes time to pay the bill. Well, not at Texas Roadhouse. They gave me an easy way to pay my bill without taking the server’s time, and it was seamless. Technology, like pay-at-the-table tablets, will help you leverage your biggest asset, your employees. 

One thing I did find odd, though, was the QR code above. In episode 744 of Restaurant Marketing Secrets, I mention how when you click the menu option on the tablet, it opens a QR code to scan for the menu. In a perfect world, this would be an all-inclusive experience, but I’m sure there’s a reason the menu is not on there.  

But I do love the VIP program that is front and center. I’ve signed up for it before, and it works great, so they get my thumb-up there.  

Day 168 – The Puzzle – Hope & Pray Cannot Be Your Restaurants Marketing Plan

Hope and pray.

You HOPE your customers had a great meal.

You HOPE your customers had a great experience.

You HOPE your customers enjoyed the atmosphere.

And then you PRAY for them to come back.

That’s different from how your restaurant’s marketing should operate.  

Your marketing should be strategic and well thought out.  Take a look at the marketing calendar above.  You’ll see that every day, there’s a list of marketing campaigns to go out for this Burger joint.  You can see 81 customers and 12 funnels on the day I’ve highlighted.  This is the opposite of HOPE & PRAY.  This is what I like to call ‘Aim & Expect’- a proactive approach where you aim for specific results and expect them to materialize.  

Marketing is about targeting customers and creating action.  You can automate your marketing efforts with the right tools, like our DRYVER platform. This restaurant, for instance, has 12 marketing campaigns that fire every day on auto-pilot.  The rest of the customers are put into other banks, and our team will work with the restaurant owner to target them with ‘One-Off’ campaigns and promos.

As I type this, NKY is getting crushed by a rainstorm.  And as I finish this blog post, a friend of mine company sent out a great email.  Look at the message below from Mella.  I’m a past customer, and our area will undoubtedly have its fair share of homes and businesses with damage that need Mella’s help (fingers crossed, not me).  In this case, they took a targeted list of past customers and aimed at them with a message that’s sure to land with many.  

And to take it a step further, when I clicked the Mella logo in the email to link it to this blog, it took me to a page on water damage needs!!!!  Mella, you all rock!

Friends, let’s get out of the “Hope & Pray” business and start AIMING marketing campaigns for the right customers so we can expect a result.

Day 166 – The Puzzle – Digging Deep Into This Restaurants Loyalty Program

I’ve always loved data, but more than that, I’ve always loved data that showed SUCCESS!

When we acquired Repeat Returns in 2023 and merged it with our marketing firm to join the DRYVER restaurant marketing platform, it gave me much more data.  But I also had to learn where to look in this new software to find the gold nuggets.  Now I know I pull three reports when trying to help a client: membership growth, member orders, and SALES!

So, whether you’re a client of ours or use a different restaurant loyalty program, here is what I’d look at if I were you.

MEMBERSHIP GROWTH

The first place I start is GAS!  What’s your car need to get from A to B, you guessed it, gas!  Every loyalty program I’ve ever seen stumbles here.  I recall a conversation in 2016 with a friend about his loyalty program. He was telling me how great it was performing.  He then went on to tell me he had 1,400 members.  I asked him, “You’ve built a 1,400-member program over 10 years?  You’re telling me over the past 520 weeks, you’ve only managed to gain 1,400 customers for your loyalty program?”

His expression turned somber, and the weight of disappointment was palpable. “Yes,” he replied, his voice tinged with regret.

The stats for the restaurant above are what I covered in episode 737 of my podcast (CLICK HERE TO LISTEN).   This restaurant only added 20-40 customers per month to their loyalty, 100% through their online orders: no in-store customer acquisition, no social media customer acquisition, and no external online customer acquisition. 

This is always the first hurdle to overcome.  With the right effort and training, any average restaurant can quickly gain 150 new customers monthly through in-store marketing.  As seen in this chart, a significant spike in new member enrolments in August 2023 prompted me to delve deeper into the following two charts. 

Customer Orders 

Orders are easy; I want to ensure it’s going up at the same rate as sales.  If I look at sales second, I could be led down the wrong path if their sales are only up due to a price increase.  This order stat is a way for me to ensure we are on the right path, a confirmation of sorts.  

SALES GROWTH

Last, I want to see if there’s a sale issue or trend.  Which, in this case, was apparent.  I showed the customer that by simply increasing his membership, he grew his sales by 32%!  Look at the image below.  He did that big upload in August and then kept adding 3x customers after that, and his sales stayed at a much higher level, an average monthly increase of $2,100 from his customer database.  The dip shown in the past month is due to Summer being his worst month every year.  When I pulled this report halfway through September, he was en route to an $8,000+ month once again.  Again, that’s not his entire sales, only the sales from his loyalty program, typically around 15% of most restaurant sales.  

Day 165 – The Puzzle – The Puzzle That’s Your Mind & Feelings

Cameron Heralds’s quote in his book Double Double is above, and mine, written solely for me, is below.
I’m honest enough without myself to know my weekly second thoughts on parts of my business plan are not healthy.
I know where I want to go, where we can go, and where we must go.
But, damn, it’s a mind fuck to look past how tough it is some days. The obstacles, the things that break, the stress, it all can and will hurt you.
It’s tough not to think, “Is there an easier way.”
It’s tough to come to grips with the fact that what you want today won’t be here for a while, and you’ll be tested daily to see if you’re strong enough to EARN it!
UNBREAKABLE in Mind, Body & Spirit is what I tell myself.
But it’s easier said than done.
Every week, I look in the mirror and say, “Matt, how do I take what I know to be true and believe it with absolute certainty 24/7?”
Being an entrepreneur and a visionary can be day-to-day.

The Puzzle – Day 164 – The Data Don’t Lie

The data does not lie, and this blog post will PROVE IT!

In episode 737 of my podcast, CLICK HERE to listen; I go in-depth on this topic, but here’s the long and short of it.

A restaurant’s loyalty program is a Ferrari.

A Ferrari needs gas.

Gas, in the case of a loyalty program, is MEMBERS!  

The chart above shows this client’s results in their DRYVER program.  The significant orange spike in August 2023 is when the restaurant owner figured out a way to manually upload a segment of his customer base that was not making it into DRYVER due to their POS (listen to the pod for more info).  

Starting last September, he figured out a solution, and those customers began being added to DRYVER. In the ten months before the new members were added to his restaurant’s loyalty program, his average monthly sales from this small segment of his customers were around $6,100. After adding 3x more monthly customers to the program, it jumped to $8,200.

He increased his customer database by 288%, and his sales followed. His sales inside his customer loyalty program went up by 33%.

It’s not rocket science. If you gain more customer information and use it with a rock-solid program (like DRYVER), your sales will increase.

Just adding more gas to the Ferrari every month now.

The next step is to DOUBLE that effort by creating an in-store customer acquisition program.

Day 161 – The Puzzle – What’s Destroying Your Daily Productivity…This Is Mine

I’m not sure how I can add any more depth to the picture above. 

This is from Cameron Herold’s “Double Double” book.  I’ll be the first to admit my phone OWNS ME!  And mainly, my email OWNS ME!

And if it owns me, it owns me, the employees, and the restaurants we are trying to help.  

How do we fix this?  For me, it starts with looking in the mirror. 

Day 159 – The Puzzle – These Weights Are Light Now, But They Used To Be Heavy

As I looked at the 35lb in the gym today, I thought about how easy it is to curl these days, but I’m sure it wasn’t so easy many years ago.  

Why is this important for us entrepreneurs to keep in mind?  Because most of what we do every day is tough, but with reps, it will be light work in no time.  

CLICK HERE to listen to episode 728 of my podcast to find out what the heck I’m yapping about today 🙂

Day 136 – The Puzzle – Wow, This Is Crazy. Chick Fil A Needs 2 Different Drive Thrus?

This was eye-opening.  When I pulled up to Chick-fil-A, they had not one but two different drive-thrus. 

One was for regular customers, and the other was for mobile orders only.  

So, while most mom-and-pop restaurants need help finding customers, Chick-fil-A has a full dining room and drive-thru lines for multiple types of customers.  

The second part that got me was that they had a drive-thru where I had to download an app and order my food.  

Now, I’m not a big fan of apps, especially for mom-and-pop restaurants, because they don’t have the brand and demand of a chain. But even for a chain, this is wild.  

So Matt, what’s the point of this blog?  

Honestly, I’ve got nothing for you outside of what’s above.  Let me think on this and get back to you because I’m sure I’ll have more on the topic in the future.  

Day 134 – The Puzzle – The Pie Is Shrinking, Go Get Your Fair Share

It is what it is.

Food costs are insane, and eating out at many restaurants is the most expensive I’ve ever seen.  This is forcing customers, as shown above, to eat out less.  

But I think this podcast sums it up best: YOU need to do more to get MORE of the pie that IS available.  

HAVE A LISTEN…CLICK HERE