“Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.” – W. Edwards Deming
Everyone in the service industry knows building and maintaining guest relationships is essential. And our modern, interconnected, socially-centric marketplace offers countless opportunities to leverage data and galvanize the connections we make with customers.
Fishbowl GRM, Fishbowl's Guest Relationship Management (GRM) platform, is built specifically for restaurant operators. But it’s also a comprehensive tool to solve strategic and tactical challenges across the industry.
In short, anyone involved in the food service industry who is responsible for improving guest experiences, strengthening marketing effectiveness or increasing customer loyalty can rely on the Fishbowl GRM.
Everyone in the service industry knows building and maintaining guest relationships is essential.
The best guest relationship strategies focus on building loyalty through multi-channel, personalized communication. And a crucial, all-too-often overlooked element of a great communication strategy is SMS marketing.
With SMS (text message) marketing, restaurants can get guests’ attention immediately, by delivering messages straight to the device they use most often – their cell phone.
While most restaurants utilize email marketing, reaching customers through SMS can be more complex, but also a more rewarding channel.
Let’s break down the most effective way to use SMS in a marketing strategy, and review some best practices to ensure maximum impact.
SMS has evolved rapidly over the last five years, but the pandemic created unprecedented adoption by businesses and customers. One study found a 450% surge in consumers texting Main Street businesses; while 34% of retail businesses embraced text messaging during the pandemic.
On average, 27% more businesses are using text message marketing today compared to a year ago.
And – the supporting numbers tell a compelling story:
These numbers make a crucial point: SMS marketing increases both value and engagement, so it’s a win-win for customers and restaurants.
How can you implement SMS marketing for your restaurant?
One of the best things about SMS marketing is its versatility – marketers can easily map SMS across different marketing goals to gain value. They use SMS marketing for a variety of communications:
Here are some key recommendations restaurants should consider to successfully implement SMS text messaging in marketing campaigns.
To be successful, your messaging should be a combination of value, exclusivity, and clarity. With every text message campaign, it’s essential to think about: what value can guests derive from, how exclusive is it, and is the message clear? The more campaigns you run over time, the more trends will emerge to help you further refine your messaging.
Getting the frequency of text messaging campaigns is often tough. Too much, and you risk being ignored. Too little, and it’s easy for customers to forget. The general rule is to stay consistent without going overboard.
According to SMS Archives, many leading restaurant brands with well-established channels text their customers 1-2 times per week.
Opting for 2-4 messages a month is a more modest starting point to communicate with someone who has requested to hear from you. Schedule those texts at consistent times, based on when you see the most engagement.
And review the Telephone Consumer Protection Act to ensure that your campaigns are compliant.
Staying relevant and creating content that recipients enjoy will help boost engagement. You can accomplish this by providing real-time information and compelling promotions.
You can further improve your effort by pairing SMS data with location data to offer tailored promotions and deals. (Questions about how to get your data working for you? See our post about Data Storytelling.)
And of course, express your brand’s personality with vision, humor and spot-on emojis to make your campaigns even more interesting.
One of the benefits of SMS marketing is that it gives you a chance to create personalized content. This also goes a long way in boosting engagement and interest in campaigns.
Leverage your guest data to send personalized messages around their last visit, purchase behavior, and time of day they visited for maximum interest.
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Today SMS is ubiquitous, and one of the most powerful tools restaurants use to reach their guests in a meaningful way.
When implemented as part of a multi-channel marketing strategy with email, social media content, loyalty rewards and offers, and data-driven personalized communication, SMS can help restaurants create and strengthen guest relationships and build loyalty.
Is SMS marketing right for your restaurant operation? Let’s get a conversation started to find out.
How to reach customers on their favorite devices: their smartphones.
In our last blog post in the “Demystifying A Restaurant CDP” series, we talked about what a CDP (Customer Data Platform) is. The next steps are determining how you might leverage a CDP platform to make crucial decisions and decisive actions critical to your business.
Most people think of data as 1’s and 0’s, long spreadsheets with letters and numbers, and an overwhelming amount of knowledge that is difficult to organize and eventually use. You may even find yourself knowing the action or outcome, but the information you need is buried within those endless rows of information. However, data is like language, you put pieces together to create a sentence, a paragraph, and eventually a story.
In the restaurant industry, we have a unique overlap between consumerism, generating experiences, nurturing social relationships, and meeting basic human needs. This creates a stage to tell a story about your customers and their behavior using the data that you have gathered.
Lets outline the path from sitting at home, feeling hungry, and all the steps before and after dining in your restaurant.
The first step in understanding customer behavior is to understand who your customers are outside the restaurant. Over the decades Fishbowl has researched key demographic factors which determine like-behavior between restaurant customers. The three critical indicators of dining behavior are:
This may feel overly simplified, but how you group these three attributes together creates distinct customer personas. Fishbowl has defined the eight main demographic personas in a restaurant as:
Fishbowl, like all proven customer-centric CDPs, will create and house these core audience segments as a starting point to micro-target or add additional complexity. For all of these segments, simply adding three fields on your join page (Birthday Year, Number of Kids, Marital Status) provides restaurants robust segmentation very quickly.
It is sometimes difficult to get inside the heads of all of your customers, but carving out a section in your CDP for survey responses, guest profiles, propensity for discounting, and other dining behaviors will help you identify key motivators. These will be the triggers for your marketing efforts to drive motivation-based decisions, even before customers identify they are hungry. Understanding the step for a customer to get off the couch (or stay and order online) is to identify what is motivating them to choose your brand to fulfill their need-state at that moment. Some examples of motivations and driving actions include:
Now here is where having both a solid system of data storage meets a robust data processing center. Preferences can either be known or inferred. Sometimes it is difficult to get truthful, complete information from a customer about what they like, so we have to make some inferences about their preferences. Within your CDP you should have a clear silo of the known and the inferred preferences, because both can balance each other out. Since you never want to override a customer’s clear response of what they like with what you perceive they like, having both data points is critical for behavior changes over time.
One mistake restaurants sometimes make is that giving a coupon for an item means that the customer loves the item and is excited to receive the discount. However, research shows that people may order an item just for the discount, but may not actually enjoy it. If we were to perceive preference on this behavior, we would miss that the discount is the preference; not the item being discounted. Your data transformation process should include a score-based methodology to determine preference – not a yes or no.
This is where a CDP can really shine. When choosing a data storage platform, you really want to factor in being able to store all of your data and be able to process it quickly and efficiently. At Fishbowl, we have built our CDP platform on a leading cloud database management platform, which allows for inexpensive storage of data and power house analytical processes. You don’t want to be stuck making the decision of only looking at subsets of your data because of technical limitations.
Purchases are the best bellwether of are you telling your story correctly. Did you understand the guest’s motivation correctly? Did they dine how you expected they would? Did customers try something new when you wanted them to? Was that discount a mediating factor to entice a lapsed guest to return?
Here is another example of how creating segments for starting points is a great idea. At Fishbowl, we use a RFM (Recency, Frequency, and Monetary) segmentation model to provide brands with easy-to-understand and usable purchase segments.
How was your customer’s experience? Did they create new motivations to dine? Maybe they changed their preferences – were you able to track those changes? This is as critical a place in your story as the dining experience itself: understanding what type of customer left your restaurant vs. the type that came in. Your CDP should include a place to intake post-dining surveys, social and website reviews, and most importantly, checking to see if they make a return visit. Remember:
70% of Guests Try A Restaurant And Never Return
The first use cases of your Customer Data Platform should be identifying the customer stories you want to tell, and making sure you have the data to back it up. To tell great stories, start with this checklist:
Part Two of our Series “Demystifying A Restaurant CDP”
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
This oft-quoted proverb is good commentary for how people build apps today.
As customers, we have high expectations for what tech can do. With today’s modern reservation systems and online ordering, we’re accustomed to getting status updates in real time, with the promise of knowing exactly when and where a dining order will be fulfilled.
At their best, apps use the best available data, the fastest connections and the most reliable cloud-computing to deliver results at the speed of light, in the most reliable and predictable way. The process should be repeatable, and infinitely scalable.
And so as developers, our instincts can be to go fast — and therefore go it alone. Code as quickly as humanly possible to deliver the latest tech in the fastest way.
But without customer context, we’re left with tech for tech’s sake. What makes an app exceptional, is when we go farther, together.
We rely on users (both our customers and their guests) to provide a useful, powerful app that delivers beyond a guest’s expectations. In partnership with our clients, we continually iterate versions that incorporate their feedback with every new feature we introduce. To design and code our app, we view the experience from and end-user’s point of view. We think about scenarios like:
Our app updates include features that help users navigate to the information they most want quickly, so it’s easy to place an order or make reservations; auto-populate my name, favorite dish or drink and other information to make a more seamless ordering experience; and the UI/UX functionality is clean, direct and purposeful.
To have a sophisticated app, you need quality code that can handle a large load of resources. It shouldn’t easily break. And it should meet those high user expectations — not just to deliver as intended, but to adapt to their needs as their experience grows.
Collaboration is a continuum. As developers and designers, we rely on user engagement to show us the power and potential of the technology we have coded, so we can continue to provide them the best experience possible. That’s the power of togetherness, and together, let’s go far.
Code quickly to deliver the latest tech, incorporate customer context to deliver exceptional product.
It’s no secret that data is powerful, but it has also become a commodity. Your guests are generating data everywhere; at the table, on your app, scrolling your social media, and simply existing in the digital world. So as a restaurateur – how do you use data? There is a lot of chatter about integrations, personalization, and the single view of the customer. At the core of all these incredible insights and actions is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) connecting all the data together. Simply put, a CDP is just one big, consolidated database where everything is connected.
First, let’s think about one of your guests. It is important to understand who they are, what they like, and what motivates them to make the move from being hungry to visiting your restaurant. Now imagine only using one of these guest attributes at a time. A CDP connects all the data together so you can make decisions with a full picture of your guest.
Here’s an example:
In this example, Lana is generating data from eight separate databases or vendors.
All these data points have one singular thing in common: Lana. The core of a CDP is the guest, and the purpose of building a customer-centric platform is to join all of these systems together using the guest as the connector.
If we only had a view of one characteristic we may miss out on a big opportunity. For example, if the only information we had readily available was what Lana orders or who she is, we may miss that she uses a coupon every time she visits. We miss out on learning that this may be her largest motivation to dine.
Additionally, when we have all the data on Lana centralized, we can see she’s visiting once a year, with a reservation for three – even though we know she is a single person. Perhaps this is a night out with friends to celebrate an occasion every year. If we know what her standard behavior is, there’s an opportunity to drive new behaviors, such as enticing her to order online by featuring a message with the steak and french fries. With all the information on Lana in one place, we can start to take a more personalized and effective approach to connecting with Lana.
Another great benefit to understanding Lana using your customer data platform is that you can quickly find other “Lanas”. You can find “Megans” who visit every Friday and only purchase a drink to go. Or “Steves” who religiously order from the gluten-free menu. With your CDP, you can create strategic and personalized experiences for your guests, without the headache of connecting data on your own.
It is daunting to have six different data-generating vendors and connecting all your systems might feel like an impossible task. Luckily, restaurant technology partners like Fishbowl are building really big data systems, connecting billions of rows of data, and making the results user-friendly and actionable.
These may seem like intimidating questions and you might not have the answers. That is okay. Fishbowl is a great partner to help take on this for you.
“CDP! CDP! CDP!” – OK What Is It? (And do I need one?)
Restaurateurs have been forced several times to become increasingly nimble while adapting their menu pricing strategy within a rapidly changing economic landscape over the past two plus years. What does the economic outlook hold for the future, and how should operators prepare now to respond?
The industry is well past the initial shock and recovery of the Covid-19 pandemic and some of its associated disruptions, although many of those disruptions and their side effects continue to remain relevant today. Supply chain disruption, staffing challenges (both in terms of talent acquisition, retention), and input cost escalation (food, labor, energy, etc.) have deeply affected restaurant business models as well as the value perceptions and behaviors of consumers.
From a demand perspective, pent up appetites, high savings rates, government stimuli, increased employment, and rising wages (albeit below inflation levels) have generally sustained U.S. consumer demand and restaurant spending, although unequally across geography and service segments.
Recently, U.S. inflation rates, while high in historical terms, appear to have leveled off in many sectors. Restaurateurs have mostly been able to sustain 7%-8% (on average) compounded year over year price growth to partially offset cost pressures, while demand has remained relatively steady. While the range of increases and associated reaction from consumers varies markedly across regions, segments, and specific brands, from a broad industry perspective, consumer price sensitivity (measured as the relative change in traffic in comparison to change in price has generally remained “low” to “moderate” since the recovery stabilized.)
As we consider menu pricing strategies, there are influences emerging that suggest that consumer price sensitivity is likely to accelerate in the coming year, driven substantially by efforts to curb inflation, and subsequent declines in GDP growth rates. Our expectation is that recession is more likely than not, and that restaurateurs should prepare now for that likelihood.
Why? Consumer spending is likely to soften as government sponsored stimuli continue to wane, excess personal savings are depleted, unemployment turns upward, the capacity to absorb credit narrows, housing costs escalate, perceived wealth and wellbeing degenerate, and on the whole, household budgets are stressed further. Our monitoring of the changes in trends across these economic measures indicates this is already occurring, and that the tipping point is near.
Receding inflation on the whole may provide some relief to consumers and business. Nonetheless, some input costs will remain pressured and supplies disrupted. Areas of concern include a potential decline in production capacity, continued animal diseases, poor crop yields due to severe weather events, and ongoing geo-political disruption, and the ripple effects of the rising cost of capital.
As a result, we believe the number of price sensitive consumers is likely to grow. Many consumers, however will remain resilient. How to respond from a price and promotion perspective will require a strategic and targeted prescription based on your consumer profiles. Value based promotions are already becoming more prominent in the QSR sector, but promotions and price increases that leverage those consumers that are not price sensitive should also be a part of a balanced strategy.
To learn how Fishbowl can help devise a pricing strategy for your brand, contact:
Ted Babcock, SVP, Fishbowl Consulting Services
ted@fishbowl.com
Learn how Fishbowl can help devise a pricing strategy for your brand.
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