In the face of rising costs and a slumping economy, restaurateurs are having to find ways to save money without risking guest satisfaction and loyalty. By consolidating technology tools into one centralized customer data platform (CDP), restaurant operators can save a significant amount of money.
Here are several consolidation ideas to help keep costs down.
Email Marketing Software
Email marketing is a very powerful marketing channel, and one of the least expensive, but services can be costly.
A CDP like Bloom Intelligence has a full email marketing solution built in. If you are paying extra for an email marketing tool, a CDP will allow you to execute automated email marketing campaigns without having to use a third-party solution.
Emails can be scheduled, or triggered by certain customer behavior or demographic data.
With Bloom’s drag & drop email builder, creating emails is quick and simple, and provides you access to a host of different professionally designed email templates. You can edit all emails to match your restaurant’s branding and personality, and send from your own domain.
Types of Email Marketing
Bloom offers several types of email marketing types. You can send:
- Offer Emails – this type of email will contain an offer, such as a free dessert. It will include a “redeem” button which can be redeemed when the customer returns. You can use this to increase guest frequency or save at risk customers with Bloom’s proprietary machine learning marketing trigger.
- Ratings Emails – this type of email contains a ratings widget that will let the guest rate you. You can use this to effectively build positive online reviews on Google and Facebook.
- Survey Email – this email contain a widget allowing a guest to give feedback, from one to five stars. This is a great way to unlock more guest insight and customer sentiment.
- Message Emails – this will allow the marketer to create and send an email with text and images. This can be used to promote delivery, online ordering, curbside pick up or even to get guests to download your mobile app.
In addition, all emails are tracked for sending, open rates, clicks, and return rates to your locations. Ratings and offers are also tracked and recorded in your database allowing you to optimize your campaigns over time.
Reputation Management Tools
Restaurant reputation management is another powerful way to improve your business. It is a very important aspect of running a successful restaurant business.
A very large part of reputation management is monitoring and improving your online guest ratings and reviews.
According to Modern Restaurant Management, an increase of just one star can give a business an approximate 5-9% increase in revenue. And an increase of just one-half star would likely fill your seats during peak business times.
They also reported that 34% of diners choose a restaurant based on peer review websites.
And 53% of 18-to-34- year-old’s reported that online ratings and reviews factored into their dining decisions.
In fact, more consumers read restaurant reviews this year than they did the year before. 90% of guests check out a restaurant online before eating there.
That’s why it is critical to have a rock-solid restaurant reputation management strategy. It should include consistently asking your guests to leave you a positive rating. And it is just as important to make sure to respond to each one of them.
A CDP can do this for you. Plus, sending the rating requests can be fully automated. Ratings from online ratings sites are consolidated into a single place to monitor and respond to.
Reputation management tools can be expensive. Consolidating into a single and much less expensive CDP can save restaurants on costs.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Technology
CRMs allow restaurants to collect guest data and insights including online and offline behavior, demographics, email, phone numbers, income, ZIP Codes, transactions, and even visit history.
Data can be collected from various sources such as your website, your POS, online ordering, and reservation systems.
With guest data, it becomes possible to engage your guests and market to them through email. Then, automate and personalize your restaurant marketing to achieve and measure specific goals such as saving your at-risk guests, building positive online reviews, and increasing your customer lifetime values.
Detailed campaign reporting also makes it easy to monitor and optimize your campaigns over time.
This is all included in the Bloom CDP. So if you are currently spending for a restaurant CRM solution, money can be saved by rolling your data into a single CDP.
Bloom Intelligence Customer Data Platform
If you are ready to start building your own powerful restaurant customer data platform, saving time and money, and collecting guest data from all of your channels, take a look at Bloom Intelligence.
By building your own restaurant customer data platform you will take control of your own first-party guest data, and unlock guest insights that will improve the success of your business. Likewise, you may be able to eliminate some of your other marketing costs.
Then, combine this with our unified WiFi marketing automation and reputation management to save time with automation, and money with the consolidation of services into one unified platform.
In today’s competitive environment, Bloom can give you the competitive edge for success!
If you’d like to see the Bloom restaurant marketing platform in action, and discover how you can grow your business through guest intelligence and marketing automation, schedule a free demo or call 727-877-8181.
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