Restaurant Customer Data Platform
Collect guest data from WiFi, websites, online ordering & reservations, social, and POS.
Scroll to explore
What is a Restaurant Customer Data Platform?
A restaurant customer data platform (CDP) allows operators to easily centralize and automate the collection of guest data into a single database that allows restaurant operators and marketers to visualize and segment guest insights.
Quick Links:
+ The Value of a Restaurant Customer Data Platform
+ How To Build a Restaurant Customer Data Platform
+ Why Clean, Verified Guest Data Is Important
+ Restaurant CDP Guest Data Collection
+ Restaurant CDP Insights
+ Marketing Automation with a Restaurant Customer Data Platform
+ Reputation Management with a Restaurant Customer Data Platform
Advanced CDPs are unified with marketing automation and reputation management tools to automate the process of finding new guests, bringing back lost guests, and increasing your customers’ lifetime values.
Even in uncertain times with dwindling consumer spending, a restaurant CDP can keep your seats full and your revenue growing.
Here’s how it works.
A customer data platform, sometimes called a restaurant CRM database, takes in data from a variety of sources such as WiFi, websites, social media, POS, review sites, online ordering, and reservations.
Types of guest data points include online and offline behavior, demographics, email addresses, phone numbers, income, zip code, transactions, reviews, online orders and visit history, which is then cleaned, organized, and aggregated into valuable customer profiles that can be used to improve marketing efforts and increase ROI.
A customer data platform creates a database of these profiles that gives you deep insights into your guests’ behaviors, habits, and desires.
It can be used to improve the targeting of your marketing campaigns, boost repeat business, personalize your guest experiences, improve online reviews, and much more.
There are many ways in which to use your restaurant customer data platform which we will be discussing below. First, let’s look at the value it can bring to your business and the time and money you can save by leveraging a customer data platform.
The Value of a Restaurant Customer Data Platform
Using a restaurant customer data platform can provide your restaurant with new levels of guest satisfaction and restaurant marketing success.
Not only will you start to understand your guests on a more intimate level, but you can also use the data to create segmented and targeted marketing campaigns that will engage the guests based on their demographics and behavior across channels.
Here are a few of the latest statistics about the benefits of using a customer data platform. According to Aberdeen, companies using a CDP saw:
- 9.1x greater annual increase in guest satisfaction rate.
- 2.9x greater year-over-year growth in annual revenue.
- 5.7x greater annual increase in guest spending.
- 4.9x greater annual growth in up-sell revenue.
You can also use your data to segment and target various guest buyers’ personas, sending targeted messages that will engage those in that particular segment.
Segmented, targeted personalized marketing is much more effective in terms of engagement and ROI. Here are some examples:
- An article from CMO.com stated that targeted advertisements are, on average, almost twice as effective as non-targeted ads.
- eConsultancy.com reported that 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases guest engagement.
- In a study by The Direct Marketing Association, segmented and targeted emails generated 58% of all marketing revenue. And 77% of ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns.
The major benefit of executing targeted personalized marketing campaigns is that you are sending your message to guests who are more likely to engage and respond.
This inherently improves the ROI of your marketing budget and keeps more seats filled and revenue growing.
It is clear that growing your own database of first-party guest data can be a huge boost for your restaurant business. Now let’s look at how to begin.
How To Build a Restaurant Customer Data Platform
Building your restaurant customer data platform with Bloom Intelligence couldn’t be easier. Using Bloom, guest data can be collected from several different sources, including your guest WiFi, your website, your POS, social media, and your online ordering system.
- Guest WiFi Data Collection – WiFi data collection is an easy way to collect real-time customer data from your actual visitors. Even if customers do not log in, Bloom Intelligence will understand their behavior data (dwell times, visit days, etc.) and add the data to your analytics dashboard. If customers do log into your WiFi via a captive portal, then a customer profile is immediately created. You will then have their contact information, email address, and or cell phone number. Then they can automatically be enrolled in any of your automated marketing campaigns. Again, this is all done automatically behind the scenes.
- Website Data Collection – Bloom has created a website widget that users can upload to their website. Once uploaded, a small, unobtrusive pop-up will show on a visitor’s browser asking them to sign up for offers and promotions. Now, a customer doesn’t have to visit your place of business to be added to your customer database. Your website visitors can enter their information and can be immediately added to your customer database and to your marketing campaigns. From that point on, you will also be able to track visits with accuracy, such as how often your clients are coming in and how long they stay at your location, the amount of time that passes between visits, and what times of day, or even days of the week on an individual or overall level. This information will help you target marketing and promotions to fill revenue gaps and boost your bottom line.
Other Data Collection Methods
- Mobile App Data Collection – After a guest signs up for your mobile app, their data can be easily imported into your Bloom customer data platform. It will be added to any existing customer profile for that guest, or it will create a new one to begin building more rich data.
- Reservations Data Collection – Just as you can with your mobile app users, you can upload guest data from a reservations system, like OpenTable, into the Bloom CDP. Then, you can use this data to build guest profiles for segmentation and targeted remarketing campaigns.
- Online Ordering Data Collection – Gather guest data such as their name, postal code, email, phone number, food and beverage order details, and spending habits. Users of GloriaFood, Olo, Toast, or Revel Systems can now easily integrate with Bloom Intelligence. This will allow them to pull this guest data into the Bloom platform. Then it can be used to trigger specific online ordering marketing automation campaigns such as sending a guest survey after ordering.
- POS – As guest orders are entered into your POS system, Bloom will be able to update each guest’s profile with transactional data when associated with a marketing offer. This will provide deep insight into the ROI of your marketing campaigns, giving you the ability to optimize over time.
- Social Media – When guests log into your WiFi using a social media platform like Facebook, and 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.
- Surveys & Online Review Sites – when a guest responds to a survey, or leaves an online review, these reviews can be pulled back into Bloom’s restaurant customer data platform, guest profiles, and used to analyze guest sentiment in our reputation management suite.
The Value of a CDP?
The true value is having a 360-degree view of your ideal guests and how they behave.
Then, you can use this information to improve your marketing, operations, and guest experience, and trigger targeted marketing based on behavior across platforms.
Why Clean, Verified Guest Data Is Important
There are customer database software solutions that will allow customers to enter data that is false. Customers might enter an email address that is entirely bogus and does not exist, or provide other false customer data, like a fake phone number or postal code.
This creates scenarios that can be detrimental to your marketing and operations strategies. Not to mention, you will lose time and money by setting up systems that will not meet their full potential because your customer data was not clean.
Bloom Intelligence verifies all emails in real-time. Additionally, Bloom checks zip codes and phone numbers for accuracy. Also, if a customer enters a birth date that appears false, Bloom will ask them for their correct birthday.
The end goal is to have complete, clean customer profiles to personalize your customers’ experiences, increasing the profitability of your organization.
And when you are studying the results of your campaigns, you can rest assured that what you are seeing is accurate and comprehensive.
Restaurant CDP Guest Data Collection
Customer profiling is a great way to get a detailed portrait of your current customer base to help you make smarter, more effective marketing decisions as you engage your customers on a more personal level.
Why Customer Profiles?
Without the advantage of using actual guest data to know customers on this detailed level, marketers are left to base campaigns and messages more on opinion or third-party data.
Third-party data is expensive and is not even a true representation of your guests.
In this situation, effective marketing becomes extremely difficult to manage, measure, and keep profitable, resulting in less-than-stellar business results.
That’s why you need to begin building your own first-party customer data platform as soon as possible.
You don’t want to be in a position where you have to pay a significant amount of money to access other companies’ third-party data to increase your business when you need it the most.
What You’ll Find in Customer Profiles
First, let’s discuss the various elements of a comprehensive customer profile. It will be important for you to collect as many of these elements as possible to achieve the best possible marketing ideas and results.
Demographics
Merriam-Webster defines demographics as, “The statistical characteristics of human populations (such as age or income) used specially to identify markets.” These characteristics commonly include data such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Income
- Children
- Marital Status
- Education Level
- Employment Status
- Physical location, such as zip code
Psychographics
Psychographics describe consumers on psychological attributes such as personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. They are meant to uncover the deeper motivations and interests of your customers. Psychographics may include things like:
- Hobbies
- Musical Taste
- Lifestyle Choices
- Food and Drink Preferences
- Personality Traits
Geographic Data
Geographic information can be very valuable, especially to businesses with multiple locations. By learning which city, state, or zip code a person resides in, you can send different messages and offers by region.
Furthermore, some companies even bring it down to the neighborhood or street level. Therefore, geographic data can be a great way to help ensure an optimal marketing campaign.
For instance, in the winter months, you wouldn’t want to promote your line of snow shovels to those living in South Florida, nor would you want to promote your line of shorts and tank tops to those living in Minnesota.
On a more local level, you could promote a new store opening. Or, only send a particular marketing message to those living within a certain distance from your store.
Behavior Data
In terms of marketing, behavior data is some of the most powerful information you can obtain. By understanding your customer behavior patterns, you can create powerful marketing campaigns based on that behavior.
This data includes things like:
- Loyalty
- Purchase Patterns
- Online Behavior
- Online Orders
- Presence Analytics — Offline Behavior
With the additional use of WiFi technology, you can gather more location-based data, such as:
- Entry and Exit Times
- Favorite Visit Times/Days
- Dwell Times
- Return Rates
- Per Person Average
- Customer Lifetime Value
With this kind of data and the right tools, you’ll have the ability to set up automated, triggered marketing campaigns that will send marketing messages to specified customer groups when certain behavioral criteria are met.
Together with the other elements of a comprehensive customer profile, the marketing campaigns you can create will become limitless and extremely targeted to specific audiences, allowing you to increase customer lifetime values, guest frequency, guest spend, and your overall bottom line.
Collecting customer profile information can help you identify your ideal audiences and boost your marketing efforts tremendously.
Restaurant CDP Insights
How much insight can you gather from your restaurant customer data platform? Plenty.
Even if guests never come to your location or log into your WiFi, you can still gather anonymous information.
This will allow you to have an accurate depiction of your busiest days and times, guest dwell times and dwell times by hour, first-time & repeat visitors, and more.
When guests log into your WiFi, sign up for your newsletter on your website, order online, make a reservation, or make a review then even more data can be collected. So, you can gain access to many of the demographic and behavioral data points discussed in the previous section above.
Further, you can gather insights about your guests’ online ordering habits, meal preferences, how much they spend, and how often.
Most importantly, you will gain access to their contact information like their email address and phone number.
So, this means that you can begin remarketing to these guests with targeted email or SMS campaigns.
Guest Segmentation
Then, as you grow your restaurant customer data platform, you will begin to realize there are various segments of your customer base. Not all guests have the same demographic and behavioral traits.
Bloom allows you to create different lists of guests based on their personal traits. Then, you can create marketing messages for each list that will engage them more intensely. You’ll see more engagement than sending a single message to your entire database.
This is known as customer segmentation, and it has proven to be much more effective than non-targeted marketing campaigns.
You can create as many lists as you want and create highly effective, targeted marketing campaigns to not only improve marketing ROI, but also to engage your guests, build loyalty, and keep your restaurant top of mind.
What’s great about using Bloom is that you can take advantage of the powerful marketing automation tools. All these campaigns can be easily configured to be sent automatically when guests meet certain criteria.
Marketing Automation with a Restaurant Customer Data Platform
Marketing automation is a tool that can save a great deal of time and energy.
With marketing automation, all you must do is configure the campaign once and it will execute behind the scenes automatically.
First, you create a message for the campaign that the system will be sending to your guests. Then, you configure the triggers that will cause the message to be emailed to the guest. Finally, you choose which segmented list to send the message to – or you can choose your entire database.
From that point on, your marketing message will be sent to each guest who meets the triggering criteria.
Marketing Campaigns
There are many different marketing campaigns and triggers:
- Happy Birthday Campaign – this is one of the most popular and successful surprise and delight campaigns. The message would go to guests a few days prior to their birthday. Typically, it will include an offer they can redeem on their special day.
- Survey Campaign – send a message to guests asking them to rate their recent experience. For example, you can send it at a predetermined time after they order online or have visited your locations.
- At-risk Guest Campaign – when guests have not ordered online in a given amount of time, or when they have surpassed their typical visit behavior, send an offer to them at the right place and time using Bloom’s machine learning which up to 38% of these guest return.
- Milestone Campaign – send a message with a reward for guests when they reach a particular milestone, such as the 10th time they order online.
- Upon Registration Campaign – send a thank you message to guests when they first sign up for online ordering, reservations, website form, or on your WiFi.
- Upon Ordering Campaign – send any message you wish whenever guests order online. For example, you can configure it to send a certain amount of time after the order, depending upon your preference for your online ordering marketing strategy.
- Online Advertising – take your segmented lists and import them into Google or Facebook to do retargeting campaigns to bring your guests back or to find new guests with look-alike campaigns.
Even More
These are just a few of the marketing automation messages you can send to your guests. For instance, you can also send triggered messages or one-time or repeating messages, offers, or surveys based on guest segmentation.
Reputation Management with a Restaurant Customer Data Platform
In today’s world, most restaurant consumers will make a Google search for a type of restaurant in a specific geography, and then look at restaurants that have high ratings on Google to decide on which restaurant to go to. In fact, 85% of customers use the internet to do research before a purchase.
Did you also know that Yelp actually ranks after Google when it comes to consumers looking at business reviews?
Furthermore, when you answer reviews about your business you are actually building trust with the reviewer. Plus, you’re building trust with any person that looks at your reviews. Most guests just want someone to hear them.
Even crazier is that 69% of job seekers turn down job offers from a restaurant with reputation management problems.
Having a standardized and automated process to respond to reviews, and analyze guest sentiment at scale is imperative to the success of your business. A negative online review profile will mean less revenue, and more operational frustrations for your current employees and affect your ability to hire quality talent.
Bloom Intelligence’s AI-powered restaurant reputation management tools allow you to respond to reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, and TripAdvisor from one single platform. The system imports all reviews made through first-party surveys and on these sites.
Use Bloom’s AI-powered response generator that suggests appropriate and unique responses for each separate review.
You can even automate the process and have the system do it all for you, saving a great deal of time to concentrate on other areas of keeping your restaurant profitable.
Click here to learn more about how this process works.
Finally, Bloom provides detailed reporting, artificial intelligence guest sentiment analysis, and the tools to respond to all reviews online and or directly to your guests in one unified platform.
This process automates and consolidates reputation management into one platform which will save your team a significant amount of time, money, and increase your revenue.
Conclusion
If you are ready to start building your own powerful restaurant customer data platform, take a look at Bloom Intelligence.
By building your own restaurant customer data platform you will take control of your own guest data, and unlock guest insights that will improve the success of your business, improve marketing ROI, and keep guests coming through your doors even in uncertain times.
Then, combine this with our unified WiFi marketing automation and reputation management to save time with automation, money with the consolidation of services into one unified platform, and increase your guest lifetime values.
In today’s competitive environment, we can give you the competitive edge for success! Let us show you how.
Want to save time and boost your profits? Book your demo now to see Bloom in action!
- Call 727-877-8181
- Email us at sales@bloomintelligence.com
- Schedule a Demo
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
Restaurant Customer Data Platform FAQs
What Does CDP Stand For?
CDP stands for Customer Data Platform. To summarize, a CRM database is a collection of guest data grouped into customer profiles. So, a CRM can be used to understand your customer base, and for segmented, targeted marketing campaigns that can be tracked for accurate attribution.
What is a CRM Database?
A CRM Database is a digital collection of individual guest information grouped into customer profiles. Likewise, the database consists of detailed guest data such as names, behavior data, demographics, addresses, zip codes, emails, and phone numbers. As a result, these profiles are used to track communication and to remarket to guests.
What are Examples of a CRM Database?
For example, a CRM database for offline companies is the Bloom Intelligence CRM database. For example, using guest WiFi access points & guest WiFi landing pages, the platform collects guest behavior data, whether they log into WiFi or not, and builds detailed customer profiles for marketing and attribution. By comparison, other popular CRM’s include Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamic, and Hubspot.
How Do I Create a CRM Database?
For restaurant and retail locations, the easiest and best way to create a CRM database is to use your WiFi access points, Guest WiFi landing page, website widgets, and API’s to collect guest information and behavior data. Then, once configured, your guest data is collected and cleaned automatically.
The Power of a Restaurant Customer Data Platform
Optimize retail &
business operations
Track attribution of
customer campaigns
Trigger marketing
campaigns based on
marketing presence
Measure the health
of corporate & franchisee
locations
Compare locations or
group of locations to
quickly identify opportunities
or threats
Are you ready to grow
your business with a
restaurant CDP and
Wifi marketing automation?
If so, find out how Bloom Intelligence’s WiFi analytics
& marketing platform measures offline guest
behavior and builds guest loyalty.
So, it’s time to start leveraging your guest WiFi to gain
a competitive edge. Then watch your profits grow.