Customer Data: The #1 Way To Boost Your Marketing ROI

There’s no shortage of guides on how to market your restaurant with social media, email, and loyalty programs, but the future of restaurant marketing isn’t simply that it’s digital—it should be driven by precise and actionable customer data.

If you want to stay relevant as a restaurant in the quickly evolving market, collecting and using customer data is something you can’t afford to skip out on.

And the best part is that it’s not difficult to get started.

The Case For Personalized Marketing

Marketing is ultimately about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

Collecting data via your POS system, loyalty program, and online ordering app gives you customer insights you could only have dreamt of before—and it opens up a whole world of marketing possibilities.

“Big data is the most effective and beneficial loyalty program a restaurant has to generate a significantly lucrative advantage.”
— Sam Darwish, Modern Restaurant Management

With behavior and demographic data as the backbone of your marketing efforts, you’re able to launch campaigns that are personalized to specific types of customers or even individuals.

And this is no small thing.

Restaurant customers who receive personalized experiences are 10x more likely to become a brand’s most valuable customers (and are less likely to see your marketing as spam).

Warning: some restaurant software and apps don’t allow you to own your customer data and offer very limited insights. We strongly suggest avoiding these solutions long-term.

2 Powerful Ways To Use Personalization To Maximize ROI

It’s one thing to collect data but another to actually use it effectively. Below are some of the high-impact ways you can personalize your marketing with your data.

Send Emails That Customers Love

You already have customer emails from online orders, digital waitlists, or your loyalty program—now it’s time to put them to clever use.

Emails that are personalized, either with the recipient’s name or with custom offers, have 11% higher open rates and 27% high click rates. Compared to social media, where less than 10% of your followers see your post, this is a huge jump in exposure. And more customers seeing a relevant offer means more customers dining at your restaurant.

Example: Send a “$10 off a wine bottle” promotion to diners who purchase wine during over 60% of their visits.

Retarget Facebook Ads Using Your Email List

Facebook allows you to upload your customer emails to their platform and create ads that re-target them specifically. This enables you to export email lists using specific criteria (top 10% of spenders, for example) and create hyper-relevant offers.

Retargeted ads are 76% more likely to be clicked than regular display ads.

Example: Display an ad that re-targets first-time visitors and offers a free appetizer when they return.

Refine As You Go

Personalized marketing is bound to perform better than mass marketing, but it’s still important to analyze the results of each campaign so that you can identify the biggest winners and improve the low performers.

And with customer data being collected constantly in the background, you’ll be able to become more and more precise (and profitable) in your marketing efforts.

There’s no need to keep using intuition and guessing to plan your marketing strategy. Customer data and personalization are far more effective—and the ROI boost can have a significant effect on your restaurant.