29 October 2024
6 hacks to improve restaurant operations
Looking to improve restaurant operations? Discover six hacks to reduce wasted time, save costs and increase revenue in your hospitality business.
That means there are more and more restaurants out there who must be looking for solutions to do just that.
However, many are still only in a position to deliver generic audience marketing – a far cry from true one-to-one messaging. If you ask these restaurant marketers about their strategies, about half will say they personalise marketing to an extent for their customers, using broader factors like physical location or loyalty scheme data.
Just a quarter will be able to tell you they go the next step, serving marketing messages to their customers using a complex blend of the most relevant channels, bespoke offers, and at the most effective messaging frequency for each diner.
So the question is, how do you get hold of the restaurant customer insights it takes to achieve this?
Have a system to gather that data!
By integrating an intelligent EPOS and analytics system such as Vita Mojo OS into your restaurant operations, it allows you to begin collecting data about your customers behaviour. More than simply informing your marketing strategy, this information can be utilised to create a bespoke strategy for every customer.
Customer Segmentation
Customer segmentation is at the core of personalised marketing and the restaurant customer insights collected by an EPOS like VM OS are informative in so many different ways.
For example, customers can be segmented according to frequency of visit, how recently they’ve made a purchase, what they purchase most, how much they spend per visit – the list goes on! This information is prime for creating a personalised marketing strategy because it allows you to target customer communications in a way most relevant to them. In the average marketing campaign, a lack of content relevancy generates 83% lower response rates (source) – that’s a pretty ineffective strategy.
If you’re able to recognise who your most loyal customers are, who the biggest Mexican food fans are or who spends the most per transaction, you can more accurately tailor the content they see individually and ensure it appeals best to each.
Real-time feedback
Being able to see feedback in real-time is a hugely valuable restaurant customer insight. This type of data is powerful because it means you can offer content to customers based on their exact experience.
For instance, you may choose to send customers who consistently rate you highly a small discount code for their next visit or simply a message to say thank you. On the other hand, you may want to send a larger discount and a message saying sorry to a customer who recently had a bad experience. The ability to differentiate marketing communications in such a varied way allows you to maximises the proportion of customers who are encouraged to come back, when compared to more traditional ‘blast-messaging’. It wouldn’t make sense to send either of those messages out to all customers so being able to segment your audience based on their experiences is vital.
Having a platform like Vita Mojo OS allowing customers to feedback both quantitive and qualitive data about their experience is seriously powerful. There’s no better way to gather that information for effectively informing your restaurants approach to personalised marketing.
Bespoke Discounts and Rewards
In a similar vein, restaurant customer insights can help you recognise who your regular customers are and offer them targeted promotions and loyalty rewards.
Customers are encouraged by Vita Mojo OS to provide instant feedback on their meals and experience. That mechanism is linked directly to the restaurant loyalty system where ratings are then tracked and linked to that customers profile. This allows the in-built restaurant analytics system to review what matters most to each customer and feedback what the most effective marketing messages would be accordingly.
For example, someone who frequently orders a coffee with their meal could be offered their next one for free, or perhaps someone who eats there once a week could be offered a 50% discount for returning sooner for a second visit.
Personalised Messaging
Being able to learn the likes and dislikes of each customer presents huge potential benefits for building a successful personalised marketing strategy for restaurants. It opens up communication opportunities that were just not possible before, including the ability to send news or updates out, tailored to each customers’ food preferences.
For example, you may have plans for a new meal, featuring Korean Pork, to be added the menu. A system like Vita Mojo OS can analyse the order history of your customer base and segment those who order meals with pork in the most, or perhaps those with a preference for Korean food. Bespoke messaging can then be targeted to customers within that segment as they have been identified as most likely to be interested, therefore most likely to come in and try it!
Similarly, you could be introducing a new vegan dish and might choose to focus on communicating this with those customers who exclude or minimise animal products throughout their order history. The options for audience segmenting are endless and the beauty of our analytics system is that it can recognise the ones that are most relevant to the needs and preferences of your restaurant.
If you’re interested in raising your marketing game and getting a strategy in place to utilise the power of personalisation, we can help you.
