In yesterday’s blog we established where to start the journey of increasing your restaurants sales by starting with your most important customers, the frequent ones, now let’s talk about HOW to gain their information.
What does it take?
First, it takes a software.
Second, it takes an offer so good they’d feel stupid saying no to it.
Third, it takes a marketing campaign to us that data correctly
And, last but not least it needs TRAFFIC.
Today, let’s talk about the first step, a piece of software capable of housing your customer data and helping you use it.
My journey into restaurant marketing software started in May 2015. It was that April when I launched our first marketing campaign on Facebook for National Pretzel Day For Hofbrauhaus. The idea was simple, prove to my clients that we could drive sales through a Facebook post. What happened after that was HUGE. We drove $18,000 in incremental sales in 1 day.
The client was stoke and their new love for digital marketing was kicked off. But then it hit me, who the heck used the BOGO pretzel promo. Yes it drove sales, but by who?
And it hit me. What if I knew who those customers were and could control their marketing journey. Easy enough, onto the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago. There were 4,500 booths, surely a marketing firm existed that had exactly what I needed.
WRONG!
There wasn’t a single company with a solution that would do what I wanted, so I created it.
From 2015 until 2017 I worked on what I called the ROI Engine, a solution to help me with gathering customer data and taking them on a journey to spending more at the restaurant. By 2023 we’d done it in a big way, but that we knew there was MUCH more to do.
And that’s when we acquired a powerhouse int he restaurant marketing software business, Repeat Returns. In was November 2023 and the vision now much bigger. It w was to build an industry first restaurant ONLY marketing platform that assisted in this and more.
So back to the topic at hand, you need a product like Repeat Returns, one that allows you to collect customer information at a level deeper than just an email.
For the past 7 years we’ve used a custom template we built in ManyChat, a tool that integrates with Facebook and Instagram Messenger. Many of you will use your restaurants Point Of Sale system, and that way work. But whatever you use, below are the questions you want to answer about your customers.
You must get their:
Name
Visit Frequency
Phone Number
Birthday
Tomorrow we talk about your ASK!
