As the restaurant industry quickly adapts to rising costs and a looming recession, owners and operators are constantly searching for innovative ways to improve guest lifetime values and keep their guests coming back.
Remarketing to current guests is an effective and low-cost way to keep your restaurant top-of-mind when your loyal guests are ready to make a dining decision.
And by doing so, it opens up a golden opportunity to also attract and bring in new guests to create an easy to manage and very profitable loop.
What is Restaurant Remarketing?
For restaurant marketers, remarketing is an essential strategy for success. By focusing on the guests who have already had contact with their brand and targeting them specifically, restaurants can maximize their promotional impact in order to bring more business through the doors.
Simply put, restaurant remarketing is a powerful way to connect with your guests online or by email. It allows you to send targeted digital advertising and behavior-driven promotions to those people through online advertising or email marketing.
It’s a key marketing concept that should be a primary focus of restaurant owners and marketers.
Remarketing allows restaurants to target guests who have previously visited their location or interacted with them in some way, nudging potential diners back into the restaurant’s orbit, increasing customer lifetime values. Keep reading to learn more.
How effective is restaurant remarketing?
Harvard Business Review has revealed that acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
Further, a Bain & Company study showed that increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25% to a whopping 95%.
Focusing on guest retention is crucial in today’s uncertain economy, and remarketing is one of the most effective and low-cost ways to bring those guests back.
One visit to your restaurant is not enough to make your brand come to mind when a prospect is ready to find a dining establishment. You need to get your brand in front of them over and over again.
Remarketing is a powerful way to connect with visitors to your website, those who have logged into your WiFi or ordered online. It allows you to use the first-party data collected through multiple channels to send targeted advertising and behavior-driven email campaigns through online advertising or email marketing.
Remarketing with Email Marketing
Restaurant email marketing is by far the most cost-effective channel in which to reach your guests with content, offers, and promotions.
By collecting guest contact information, ideally their verified email address, marketers can send unobtrusive branded promotions, surveys, and other valuable information to their targeted lists of email subscribers.
Using a restaurant customer data platform, or CDP, you’ll not only make passive data and email collection possible, but you can also automate your entire email marketing strategy.
A CDP collects guest data, including their email address, from multiple sources, such as WiFi logins, online ordering and reservations, POS systems, websites, and more. It centralizes all of the data into a single guest database.
Then, using a unified marketing automation platform, email campaigns can be created and triggered based upon guest behavior and demographic information.
For example, you could create a campaign that would send an email asking for a rating of your guest’s experience a few hours after they have left your place of business or placed their order online.
There are countless campaigns available with a CDP like Bloom Intelligence. This include first-party surveys, ratings requests, birthday campaigns, loyalty campaigns, churning guest campaigns, and many more.
Best of all, everything is completely automated. After configuring your campaigns, it becomes free, targeted marketing that can keep your guests returning again and again.
All you need to do is monitor the results with the CDP’s detailed reporting feature, and optimize your campaigns over time.
This further strengthens brand awareness, placing it in front of your customers over and over again. To learn more, visit our restaurant remarketing page here.
You can also use your customer list to target online advertising on Facebook or Google and its partner sites.
Remarketing with Facebook Ads
With your own first-party customer data, you can easily create a list of guests which you can upload to Facebook.
Also known as a Custom Audience, Facebook will match your data with the guest’s account on Facebook. Then, whenever the guest logs into Facebook or Instagram, they can be served advertisements you have assigned to that particular list.
Using segmentation, you can further target your advertisements by uploading lists based on behavioral or demographic information and then assign specific, targeted advertisements more likely to engage that group of guests.
Bloom also gives you the ability to embed a Facebook pixel into your WiFi landing page or website. When a guest logs into your guest WiFi or visits your website, the pixel is triggered, and the action is recorded.
You then have the option to target those guests with Facebook and/or Instagram ads using Facebook’s Custom Audience feature.
For instance, when someone is at your place of business and logs into WiFi, the pixel is triggered and recorded. Unlike cookies, the pixel is not stored on the user’s device.
Then, when you create a Facebook ad campaign, you can instruct Facebook to show the ad only to those who triggered the pixel.
So, every time that guest logs into Facebook or Instagram, they will be targeted by the platform with your advertising campaign.
Another way to gain more new guests through advertising on Facebook and Instagram is by creating a “lookalike” campaign.
Since Facebook uses the pixel to track those who log into your WiFi, it will soon begin to understand the demographics and behavior patterns of those customers.
The platform can then search its enormous database to find others who share similar patterns and traits.
For example, if your customers who log into WiFi are mainly 25-35-year-old males who live in urban areas, Facebook can see this and create a list of people with those same traits.
Then, you can create an advertising campaign to target that lookalike audience.
Remarketing with Google Ads
Google also has a version of lookalike campaigns that you can use alongside Bloom to bring in new and existing customers. They call this Similar Audience Targeting.
It works in a different way than the Facebook Advertising pixel.
When guests log into WiFi at your place of business, they are taken to a WiFi landing page, also known as a captive portal.
This page requires the customer to enter their email address to gain full access to the internet.
The CDP then creates a customer profile for that guest and stores the email address – along with all of the past and future behavior data – in your customer database.
Likewise, when a guest orders online a customer profile is also created.
At any time, you can easily export all of these email addresses into a spreadsheet. Then, you can upload the spreadsheet to the Google Ads platform.
The platform will analyze the characteristics and behavior patterns of the customers and create your similar audience to target through Google Ads.
Your ads will only show to those who are within your similar audience. They will show on Google search results pages and on websites featuring Google Ads.
In addition, if you create a video advertisement, Google will display the ad to your similar audience on the YouTube platform, as well.
Get Started Today
Are you ready to become your guests’ favorite brand and watch your bottom line grow?
If you are looking for a low-cost way to improve guest retention, find new guests, and increase your bottom line, remarketing through email marketing and digital advertising should be a priority for you and your business.
New guests mean new profits. Repeat guests mean repeat profits.
These were only a few of the restaurant email remarketing examples of what you can do with a customer data platform unified with marketing automation. To learn more and see many more examples, visit our restaurant remarketing page.
Discover the Bloom Intelligence Customer Data Platform
It’s time to start planning for the successful future of your restaurant. And ensuring strong guest retention is the secret in today’s uncertain economy.
Using Bloom’s restaurant marketing and customer data platform, you can collect data from many different sources. Then you can leverage the real-time guest insights and campaign reporting to not only get your current guests back through your door but also to attract new guests and keep them coming back.
In a rough economy with rising food and labor costs, guest acquisition and retention are crucial for success.
If you’d like to see the Bloom restaurant customer data 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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