‘Cueing Up Success: Edley’s Bar-B-Que Goes Local
What do you do when a global pandemic shuts down the country and threatens to stop a thriving tourist city in its tracks? If you’re like Edley’s Bar-B-Que in Nashville, Tennessee, you go back to your roots.
Nashville is a city heavily steeped in country music, from the Grand Ole Opry and Johnny Cash Museum to the Country Music Hall of Fame. In 2019 alone, the city saw an estimated 16 million visitors, setting a new annual record.
During the early months of 2020, Edley’s Bar-B-Que, a fast-growing brand of quick service/fast casual restaurants, faced an unthinkable situation. By using GoGoGuest customer intelligence software platform for restaurants, Edley’s has designed a powerful data-driven guest engagement plan that is taking the chain to new heights.
Excitement, Engagement, Personalization: The Plan to Connect with Customers
When Edley’s joined the GoGoGuest family in September 2019, they were 100% focused on new customer acquisition at the store level. On top of that, the BBQ brand wanted an easy way to re-engage with guests who visited their locations.
Guests are typically not excited about trading their contact information for a receipt, but when they can get something in return, giving out their email address is a lot more appealing. GoGoGuest was installed at Edley’s Sylvan Park location in Nashville, TN, and the brand set to work implementing an attractive and beneficial program to create value in return for their guests’ contact information.
In a town that thrives on a young and hip local market, alongside tourists from all over the world, offering fast, secure, and reliable guest WiFi creates a compelling exchange for personal information. Processing an average of more than 1,000 transactions each day, by trading WiFi access for contact information, Edley’s quickly added new names to its marketing list.
“We run a gift card campaign every Christmas, and we set up a competition amongst all of our stores to see who could sell the most gift cards,” Mark Harvey, Creative Manager for Edley’s, said. “This year, online sales won. Granted we’re in a pandemic, but the fact that our online sales were able to outdo all our other stores for the first time since we’ve been doing these sales is pretty cool. We can thank GoGoGuest for helping us get the word out.”
Using GoGoGuest’s WiFi marketing for restaurants, Edley’s BBQ increased its customer acquisition rate by 40% across its locations. At the same time, the BBQ chain learned more about its customers, inspiring the brand to personalize its digital experience and compel guests to return over and over again.
Using the contact information collected from its WiFi marketing, Toast POS, and other sources, Edley’s was able to:
- See how many customers visit each day, week, or month, and at what times
- Identify high-value customers based on spending habits and frequency
- Design campaigns to excite Edley’s guests and get them to come back
Edley’s could also group guests into cohorts using dynamic segmentation, allowing the brand’s marketing team to reach out to specific customers with targeted offers at the perfect time.
The result? Their revitalized marketing backed by actionable data and personalized outreach messaging paid off. For the first time ever in the brand’s history, online sales for Thanksgiving dinners in 2020 exceeded in-store sales!
Low and Slow Meets Fast and Friendly
Since joining GoGoGuest in September 2019, Edley’s has developed an incredible community of active email subscribers that have added new life to its marketing strategy – even during a pandemic. For a company that did not have a defined email campaign and relied mostly on social media for sharing updates, adding GoGoGuest to the equation has been powerful.
Today, Edley’s BBQ has:
- More than 28,000 active subscribers
- 86% local email customer engagement
- Sent out nearly 1.2 million emails, resulting in targeted campaign conversion rates of 28%
- Increased tourist-focused messages by 32%
- Launched a new “Pitmaster’s Choice” offer at its five locations for its most loyal local fans. The program is sent to guests via email and SMS, depending on customer preference.
“We run a gift card campaign every Christmas, and we set up a competition amongst all of our stores to see who could sell the most gift cards,” Mark Harvey, Creative Manager for Edley’s, said. “This year, online sales won. Granted we’re in a pandemic, but the fact that our online sales were able to outdo all our other stores for the first time since we’ve been doing these sales is pretty cool. We can thank GoGoGuest for helping us get the word out.”
Edley’s has no plans to stop there. The brand is currently working on a new customer loyalty program that combines points and tiers, allowing customers to turn their dollars into points. Toast POS tracks the dollars spent and allows guests to check their balances as they accrue points, while GoGoGuest tracks all points and rewards in the background.
Fired Up for the Future: Data-Driven Restaurant Decisions
In the right hands, data analytics and insights can make a good restaurant great. For Edley’s BBQ, combining Toast POS’ daily reports and transaction data with GoGoGuest’s customer intelligence software platform is a total game-changer. Operators can see how data from both platforms work with each other to direct guest engagement campaigns, understand customer loyalty metrics, and guide promotions.
What can access to data do? With the right insights, brands can:
- See who makes purchases and how often
- Create intriguing upsell and cross-sell opportunities
- Create and manage unique campaigns for new, mid-tier, and win-back guests
- Easily determine what campaigns work and don’t work
- Test and track new outreach and engagement methods
With the right information at its fingertips, Edley’s has been able to implement marketing campaigns that work, with higher engagement, more revenue, and better outcomes!
“Overall, we’ve been very, very pleased with the service that GoGoGuest has provided,” Harvey said. “They help us when we have questions and help us analyze the data. It’s really nice to have somebody that can help us learn more about our customer data, and frankly, put it to work to drive sales. I would highly recommend anybody to speak with someone at GoGoGuest and see how they can help find an email marketing or text message marketing solution for your company.”
Can GoGoGuest Do The Same For You?
Customers don’t want to sacrifice their data for a receipt or a stale, tired mass blast email. Increasingly, guests want to be delighted with personalized outreach that shows you understand them and entices them to take action.
With GoGoGuest, our customers:
- Own their own first-party data
- Can create “network effects” across their brands
- Motivate guests to take action across multiple channels, including email, SMS, and ads
Data-driven marketing helps restaurant concepts of all sizes learn more about their guests by highlighting subtle nuances that may be missing from daily reporting. GoGoGuest makes it easier to understand the data restaurants track each day and compile it into actionable insights that work today and in the future.
Want to see what GoGoGuest can do? Click here to get started or book an appointment to learn more. Take the next step toward creating restaurant marketing campaigns and offers your guests will love and deliver results.
