• Restaurant Marketing

Restaurant Email Marketing: Personalization and Segmentation Tips

by: Allen Graves
4 min read

Personalization of restaurant email marketing messages is crucial to winning over today’s savvy consumers. Personalization refers to using customer data to create much more effective email content because it can be tailored for each individual or each customer persona.

Using personalized messaging has been proven to improve open rates and generate more revenue because it allows restaurant marketing professionals to create more relevant content that will more effectively pique the interest of the consumer.

By collecting guest data through your WiFi access points, and grouping those customers into separate lists, marketers can avoid sending out a single mass message in hopes that it resonates well with at least some of the audience.

Instead, they can focus on sending highly targeted messages to each customer segment, increasing open rates and encouraging more engagement.

email marketing personalization

How to Collect Individual Customer Data

To execute an effective personalized restaurant email marketing campaign, you’ll need to have comprehensive data about your individual customers. There are various ways in which to collect customer data, but most are either expensive or take a great deal of time and energy.

The only way to gather enough data to effectively create a personalized campaign is to use a quality WiFi Analytics platform. Using WiFi technology, you’ll be able to capture data directly from your customers when they log into your WiFi access point. This will allow you to passively gather the necessary individual customer information required for proper personalization.

Using progressive profiling, data such as name, email address, phone number, age, gender, birthday, and other information is entered by the customer each time they log back into your WiFi.

In addition to all of this demographic information, the WiFi analytics platform also tracks the physical behavior of your customers, logging things such as dwell times, repeat visits, coupon redemption, days of the week, and hours of the day they have visited.

With this kind of thorough and reliable data, marketers can begin using it to build powerful, data-driven targeted restaurant email marketing campaigns.

Personalization for restaurant email marketing guide

Using Data to Build Personalized Marketing Messages

According to research from Salesforce, the world’s #1 customer relationship management platform, data targeting and segmenting were used 51% more by overperforming businesses than those who were underperforming. This makes perfect sense when thinking about today’s consumers. They expect personalized messaging and they know when they’re receiving a simple generic mass-marketing message.

The simplest way to start creating personalized campaigns is to make your customer profile data filterable. This will allow you to start building segments of specific customers based on their demographics and behavior data.

Email Segmentation for Marketing

It is important to be able to save these segmented lists. Then, you won’t have to build them each time you want to send out a message.

Some examples of segmented lists might include:

  • Women over 30 who visited on Mother’s Day of last year
  • Any customer who has visited more than x times
  • Customers whose average dwell time is under 20 minutes
  • Men below 45 years old who have only visited your establishment once
  • Women/Men who only visit at lunchtime

As you can imagine, these specific audiences would likely respond best to entirely different marketing messages. Being able to segment your customer list allows this to happen.

While building these lists, you’ll need to be brainstorming about how to effectively engage these groups. As you go through this process, ask yourself and your team members these questions:

  • What kind of action do I want this customer to take?
  • What is the best way to reach this customer?
  • Which kind of deals or promotions would interest this customer?
  • What kind of deals and promotions would NOT interest this customer?
  • What new products or services might engage this customer?
  • Why do they need what I offer? What are this customer’s pain points?
  • How can I attract and engage more customers like this?
  • What type of imagery would engage this customer?

personalization

Always Be Testing

Now that you have your customer segments properly defined, and you have an idea of the marketing messages and promotions you want to send to them, it’s time to get started. When you send your marketing message to each list, monitor the ROI of each campaign.

As initial results come in, analyze the results and keep them documented in your platform. The next time you send a message to each group, you’ll want to make a small change to the message. You should only make a single change to the message while testing. Send the message and compare its results to the original message. If the results are not as good as the original, go back to your original message and test a different aspect of the message. If results are better, keep the change and continue testing and optimizing over time.

Also, don’t forget that you’re not just targeting current customers. You should also be seeking out new lookalike prospects online and targeting them in an effective manner using the data you’ve collected. These prospects should have a higher probability of becoming new customers. They can provide a more cost-effective means of acquiring new customers.

Final Thoughts On Email Personalization

Personalizing your restaurant email marketing messages with reliable customer data has been proven as an effective way to deliver relevant and engaging marketing content to your customers. This adds value to their experience and can quickly improve your open rates and subsequent revenue.

Using a WiFi marketing and analytics platform to collect a large volume of the right data, personalizing your marketing campaigns has never been easier. You’ll feel confident as you make solid data-driven decisions. You’ll drive company growth and build a much larger base of loyal customers.

With the amount of competition out there, email marketing can give you a strong competitive advantage and ensure lasting success.

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

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

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