Restaurant owners and operators face an uphill battle in the current market, where competition is fierce and costs are high. To stay afloat, it’s essential to not only draw new guests but also to retain them with return visits.
The key to finding new guests and producing strong guest loyalty is to collect accurate, comprehensive guest data to understand who your most loyal guests are. Then, you can create targeted marketing and remarketing campaigns to find more of them and keep them coming back.
Likewise, you can use the the data to make intelligent decisions about your restaurant’s operations, staff training, and procedures.
In this post, we will talk about the various ways to collect guest data to build a large, clean restaurant customer data platform and ways to use it to improve your restaurant business.
Restaurant Customer Data Collection
The first step in collecting restaurant guest data is to incorporate a restaurant customer data platform like Bloom Intelligence.
Once set up and configured, you can begin collecting guest data from many different sources, giving you a full 360-degree view of your customer base – from online behavior, to demographics, to to how guests interacrt when they are at your restuarant.
Here are several ways you can collect your guest data using a restaurant CDP.
On-Premise WiFi Guest Data Collection
Understanding how your guests behave when at your place of business can proide you with invaluable insight into how you can optimize your restaurant to improve the overall guest experience.
When guests come to your place of business with a WiFi-enabled device like a cell phone or laptop, Bloom can sense the device. Even if guests do not log into your WiFi, the system knows their device is there.
Using this technology, you can gather accurate behavior data insights from guests who are at your place of business. You can see anonymous data like:
- Daily traffic counts
- First-time visitors
- First-time visitor return rate
- Popular visit times
- Dwell times, and dwell times by hour
- Average guest repeat rates, and more
Plus, you can filter this data by day and compare between days or different locations. This allows you to see trends and adjust marketing and operations procedures based on actual guest data. Then, you can monitor results in real time and make data-driven decisions to improve your business.
When guests do log into your WiFi, you can collect much more data, including their contact information like their email address or mobile number. Then you can begin creating remarketing campaigns to keep them coming back again and again.
When guests log into your WiFi using a social media platform like Facebook any shared data from that platform will be added to that guest’s profile. This gives you data such as their name, gender, birth date, postal code, and even their profile picture.
Likewise, using progressive profiling, you can ask them for a different data point every time they log in. Over time you’ll gather data such as their:
- Name
- Age/Birthdate
- Gender
- Postal code
- Mobile number, and more.
Using this data, you can create extremely targeted marketing campaigns that will speak to each guest on a more personal level. This will drive more engagement with your messaging and build more revenue for your business.
Website Data Collection
More and more, consumers visit a business’s website prior to making a final decision on spending their money with that business.
When current and potential guests visit your website, you can use it as an opportunity to collect guest data. Bloom Intelligence can give you a small piece of code to place on your website that will display a small signup form for your newsletter or special promotional emails.
When website visitors fill out the form and submit it, their data immediately goes into your restaurant customer data platform.
From then on, if they log into your WiFi, or order from your online ordering platform, Bloom will recognize that particular guest. It will then begin adding behavior and purchasing data to their guest profile.
Online Ordering Data Collection
With the rise of the pandemic, restaurant online ordering has become very popular over the last few years. According to Zippia, online food ordering has grown 300% faster than dine-in since 2014 and now accounts for roughly 40% of total restaurant sales.
Likewise, 60% of Americans order delivery at least once per week and the average American spends $67 on takeout per week.
If you use an online ordering system like Olo or Oracle’s GloriaFood, then you can collect even more guest data. When guests order online, they can be required to enter their email and/or phone number prior to making their purchase.
This data is then added to a customer profile for the guest. Purchasing behavior is also included.
Using Bloom’s automated marketing tools, you can then trigger email marketing campaigns with first-party survey requests, offers, and more.
Reservation System Data Collection
If you utilize a reservation system for your restaurant, it provides another stream of data for your CDP. It’s easy to upload the data you receive into the Bloom customer data platform.
Bloom creates customer profiles for each guest, and if they are already in your platform, then Bloom will recognize them and continue building their profile with any new data provided.
The data is filterable, allowing you to segment similar guests into data-specific lists. Then, you can use this data for more profitable segmented and targeted remarketing campaigns.
POS System Data Collection
As guest orders are entered into your POS system, Bloom is able to update each guest’s profile with transactional data when associated with a marketing offer.
This can be done through an integration between your CDP and your POS system. Or, the data can be quickly and easily uploaded into the CDP.
This will provide deep insights into the ROI of your marketing campaigns, and give you the ability to optimize over time.
By knowing which guests spend more and come more often, you can optimize marketing campaigns to keep your ideal guests coming back.
Online Review Site Data Collection
When a guest responds to a survey or leaves an online review, the ratings and reviews can be pulled back into Bloom’s restaurant customer data platform. It’s a great way to see all reviews from Facebook, Google, and Bloom surveys all in one place.
The reporting in the reputation management tools allows you to easily see your aggregate and individual guest rankings data, as well as spot trends over time.
You can save time by being able to respond to all reviews in one simple platform in real time.
It also contains a, articial intelligence-generated word cloud which allows you to easily get a picture of guest sentiment. You can see what your guests love about your restaurant, or what could use more work.
Understanding guest sentiment allows you to quickly understand how your guests feel about your restaurant, whether visiting your place of business, ordering online, or engaging with your brand online.
Discover Bloom Intelligence
With Bloom, you’ll have a complete 360-degree view of your guests. Then you can use the data to improve marketing and operations, save time, and increase guest lifetime values.
If you are ready to start collecting your own first-party guest data, you need to give Bloom Intelligence a look.
Not only will you be able to automate your restaurant marketing, but you can also use it to unlock valuable guest insights, improve your ratings and reviews, identify and bring back lost guests, and so much more.
You’ll feel confident as you make solid data-driven decisions. You’ll drive company growth and build a much larger base of loyal guests.
With the amount of competition out there right now, Bloom can give you a strong competitive advantage. Are you ready to ensure lasting success?
So, click for a free demo of the Bloom Intelligence platform, or call to schedule today at 727-877-8181.
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