Chicago, IL (-) Every full-service restaurant understands the importance of attracting customers. To be successful, however, restaurants must turn those customers into long term guests. But how? According to DataDelivers, the leader in data analytics for today’s digital marketing, the first steps are to identify and segment your customers and then leverage lifecycle marketing strategies to grow them into high value guests. How to do this and other strategies are included in a new free e-book, Guest Lifecycle Marketing, available now from DataDelivers.
According to 2021 DataDelivers research that encompasses more than 58 million transactions and 27 million guests across dozens of brands, four distinct customer lifecycles were identified.
The largest category within the lifecycle is new customers which represents someone visiting for the first time. The first critical data point operators need to know is whether these new customers return. After this initial experience, customers can move into two categories – the one who visits again and becomes Engaged, or one who doesn’t visit for more than six months and is At-risk of never returning. If a year goes by without a visit, the guest becomes Inactive. The most profitable category, of course, is active customers, those who visit more than once a year.
“For a restaurant, the difference between sales increasing or decreasing is whether a new customer comes back,” said Patrick Riley, vice president of business development at DataDelivers. “Unfortunately, we’ve seen that up to 90% of customers are first time visitors who never return a second time; changing this one statistic can and will significantly change your business.”
New and Engaged customers are good for business. Those At Risk and Inactive customers present opportunities for conversion once you can identify them. The lifecycle of these customers changing from category to another is a critical pathway for operators to understand where their restaurant is winning and losing.
Understanding the migration between Engaged and At Risk is the second critical data point for operators. If you can grow Engaged guests, you will grow sales. If more guests are moving to At Risk, then something is causing them not to return and if this is not remedied, sales and traffic will decline.
Better Data Makes the Difference
By bringing together everything you know about a customer and their buying behaviors, you will have the information you need to know where guests are, where they are going, and how to convert customers into loyal, profitable guests. This requires connecting data from the entire restaurant’s systems including POS, loyalty, online ordering and reservations, e-clubs, mobile apps, and any other data management platforms the brand employs.
This single view is what allows a brand to build a 360-degree understanding of the customer including when they visit, how much they spend, and what they order. This is the foundation of a successful guest lifecycle marketing effort.
Learn more by downloading the free e-book at www.datadelivers.com.
About Data Delivers
For more than 20 years, DataDelivers’ data integration capabilities help brands gain a single view of their guests across channels and transform data into relationships that bring long term growth and value. The DataDelivers’ CDP, Customer Management Platform, allows brands to gain clarity about their customer data, take actions that build stronger relationships and measure the results of those efforts. DataDelivers’ CustomerConnect quickly enables a brand to market to active guests who are not currently members of their loyalty program.
Headquartered in Schaumberg, IL, in 2021 DataDelivers has helped restaurant clients identify more than 15 million new guests, generate more than 2 million incremental visits, and produce more than $40 million in additional revenue.
For more information, visit DataDelivers.com.