• Restaurant Marketing

Valuable Guest Insights You Can Gain From a Restaurant Customer Data Platform

by: Allen Graves
5 min read

A robust and reliable analytics platform is central to the success of your restaurant business. Restaurant customer data platform analytics can provide you with a wealth of insight into how your guests behave and spend.

In turn, it will help you generate more guests, increase sales, gain insights into customer behavior and preferences, create detailed customer profiles, measure return on investment (ROI), and maximize those valuable marketing and operations dollars.

Surprisingly, though, many restaurateurs are still in the dark when it comes to using data analytics for business growth purposes and measuring ROI.

For example, a CMO Council survey of senior marketing executives found that “more than 80% of respondents were dissatisfied with their ability to measure marketing ROI, and fewer than 20% of the respondents said their companies employed meaningful metrics,” as reported by the Harvard Business Review.

Brick-and-mortar businesses, like restaurants, have been at even more of a disadvantage because guest data collection has traditionally been difficult to collect and very expensive.

Fortunately, Bloom Intelligence now makes it very simple to do, and at pennies on the dollar compared to other data collection methods.

In our last post, we discussed the various ways to collect guest data, such as through your website, your POS, your online ordering system, and your guest WiFi.

Now that you are collecting guest data, here are some of the various insights you can glean from it.

Restaurant Guest Data: On-Premises Insights

Even if guests do not log into your WiFi, Bloom will know that their device is at your location. This can give you very detailed and accurate insights that you have simply not been able to see before. Here are a few of the most valuable.

Guest Dwell Time

The amount of time guests spend in a location is called “dwell time” and it is a key performance indicator (KPI) for any brick-and-mortar business.

Dwell time is related to several important metrics like customer satisfaction, shopping experience, and even sales.

CDP Insights - Customer Dwell Time

According to a study by PathIntelligence, increasing dwell time by just 1 percent leads to an average 1.3 percent increase in sales. Although 1 percent may not sound like much, it can make a serious difference in your bottom line when multiplied across all of your guests and locations.

With Bloom, you will also see dwell times by the hours, letting you know how long guests stay when arriving at a specific hour of the day.

CDP Insights - Guest Dwell Time by Hour

Popular Visit Days and Times

When you’re busy running a restaurant business, it may appear at first glance that you’re always experiencing the same guest visitation rates on a daily basis. In reality, it probably varies more than you think.

With Bloom, you’ll see accurate guest visit days and times. You’ll see daily averages, or you can drill down into specific days of the week.

CDP Insights - Popular Visit Times

A great aspect of collecting guest data is how you can use it to map out more staff efficiency.

For instance, you can know exactly how to manage staffing schedules based on when you have the highest foot traffic during any given day. Now you can save money by avoiding paying for extra help you don’t really need.

It will also help you make data-driven purchasing decisions, so you can avoid 86’ing menu items or end up with wasted inventory.

Other Guest Behavior Metrics

With the ability to sense and track individual guest devices, you’ll be able to see other valuable metrics to help you understand guest behavior and improve your business.

You will be able to see your first-time visitor return rate and average guest repeat rates. Repeat customers ensure long-term business success, but getting them in quantity can be difficult when you lack feedback on the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Fortunately, such feedback is readily available with Bloom.

CDP Insights - Business Metrics

If you have a high first-time visitor return rate, it means you’re doing something or several things right. If you can maintain this return rate, retain these customers over the long term, and increase their lifetime value, your business can grow rapidly.

Other Business Metrics

Using machine learning algorithms, Bloom can give you data about your average guest loss, as well as projected visits. This can further strengthen your staffing and purchasing decisions, saving you time and money while improving overall guest satisfaction.

Integrating Bloom with your POS system can also provide you with accurate per-person averages and guest lifetime values.

Restaurant Reputation Management

Bloom Intelligence integrates with Google and Facebook, allowing you to see and respond to all of your ratings and reviews on these platforms in one place.

With the graphical charts, you can easily spot trends over time and work to make your restaurant’s reputation better.

CDP Insights - Restaurant Reputation

You’ll also have access to a word cloud showing your positive, neutral, and negative sentiment from all of those online reviews. This can help you better understand what you are doing great, and what might need more attention.

CDP Insights - Guest Sentiment Word Cloud

Your reputation, online or offline, can literally make or break your restaurant business. It can make the difference between having a waitlist or having a sparse dining room with too many empty seats.

This is why actively managing your restaurant’s reputation is crucial for a profitable, growing business.

Discover Bloom Intelligence – Your Guests Will Love You For It

With Bloom, you’ll have a complete 360-degree view of your guest base. 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 email marketing, but you can also use Bloom 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, Bloom can give you a strong competitive advantage and ensure lasting success.

So, click for a free demo of the Bloom Intelligence platform, or call to schedule today at 727-877-8181.

restaurant online ordering marketing demo

 

Restaurant Marketing FAQs

What is Restaurant Marketing?

Restaurant marketing is the process of getting people to visit your restaurants. Restaurant marketing creates loyalty, provides data to research, analytics, and allows restaurants to gain a better understanding of their ideal customer profile. It utilizes all customer channels: guest WiFi, website, social, rating sites, mobile apps, email, text, and advertising.

Learn More About Restaurant Marketing Here

What is WiFi Marketing?

WiFi marketing is a marketing technique that uses guest WiFi to collect & clean customer data such as names, emails, phone numbers, customer behavior, and demographics. This data is used to personalize marketing campaigns to increase customer loyalty, build online reviews, and save at-risk customers. The performance of every campaign can be tracked down to the tangible ROI of a customer walking back in your door.

Learn More About WiFi Marketing Here

What is Restaurant Reputation Management?

Restaurant reputation management is the process for restaurants to manage customer feedback and creating systems to improve customer experiences, passively build positive online reviews, and save at-risk customers. It is a very important aspect of running a successful restaurant business.

Learn More About Restaurant Reputation Management Here

How Does Bloom Identify and Bring Back Lost Customers?

Bloom Intelligence uses machine learning to identify at-risk customers. When one is recognized, the system will send them a message with an incentive to get them to return and re-establish their visit pattern. Bloom users are seeing up to 37% of churning customers return.

Learn More About Saving At-Risk Customers Here

SAVE TIME, INCREASE CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUES, CREATE NEW CUSTOMERS

What our happy customers
are saying

“SaaS that covered so many bases for us instead of having to use multiple software products. Bloom Intelligence has simplified our responses to reviews, customer feedback, and more. I highly recommend Bloom Intelligence.”

Robert Sanderson

“Bloom Intelligence really is a step ahead in terms of marketing software and metrics. Their product is reliable, fast and innovative and has helped the company I work for really grow.”

John Marchetti

“Working with Bloom Intelligence has been amazing. They assist you every step of the way and work with you hand in hand to make sure you are optimizing your advertising potential. We are excited to use this tool to help learn more about our customers so that we can personally engage with them and understand our strengths/weaknesses.”

Ariel Ramirez

“In these challenging times, it has been a pleasure working with Bloom Intelligence to help facilitate our service offering to our clients. They were extremely responsive and provided support to mitigate risk and minimize revenue loss. Great partner!”

Stefan Kim

“We’re extremely pleased with the wealth of customer data that we’re able to gather, at a very attractive price.  In addition, we’re able to communicate our new product promotions by using  the landing page as a digital billboard.  A “no-brainer” for anyone working with limited Marketing $$.”

Bob Cross, Vice President of Operations

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