Reimagining Customer Acquisition and Automation for Restaurants

Edley's BBQ is a fast growing quick service restaurant in Nashville, TN that specializes in Nashville style bar-b-que.  Edley's is known for its delectable barbecue dishes and warm southern hospitality. With its rustic and cozy ambiance paired with a mouthwatering menu, Edley's has become a go-to dining destination for locals and tourists alike.

However, in a highly competitive restaurant industry, it takes more than just delicious food and an innovative menu to attract and retain customers. To keep up with the ever-changing landscape, Edley's has reimagined their new customer acquisition and email marketing automation strategies with a streamlined technology tech stack that is integrated with their POS solutions and online ordering channels.

In this case study, we will explore how Edley's BBQ successfully grows their new customer base and keeps existing customers highly engaged using guest WiFi marketing, a centralized customer data management platform (CDP), a multi-channel marketing approach (email and sms) approach to guest activation and engagement.

Acquire new customers daily, activate and re-engage quickly

In today's competitive culinary landscape, the restaurant industry is increasingly benefiting from data-driven marketing efforts. By harnessing multiple data sources available to them, restaurateurs are actively looking for ways to grow their customer base daily and foster loyalty across their different customer groups. Edley's customer acquisition strategy and growth can be attributed to similar efforts that today's innovative restaurant businesses are using to grow their audience.

Achieve over 20% in unique diner acquisition and customer engagement

When Edley's BBQ reached out to GoGoGuest in early 2019 (pre-pandemic) the main focus of their strategy was simple: re-energize new customer acquisition efforts with little to no disruption on the front-of-the-house workflows and operations.

Here's a quick summary on how GoGoGuest helped meet Edley's new customer growth and marketing goals:

• Ease of onboarding Edley's multiple locations.  GoGoGuest makes it super easy to onboard multiple locations in a short period of time.  Working with Edley's IT network administrator, the GoGoGuest  team helped the Edley's team navigate their Unifi network settings to accommodate a third-party guest WiFi captive portal. Frictionless guest experience.
• New customer acquisition and consistent growth. Growing a restaurant's customer base can be tricky when there are no outbound marketing strategies in place.
• Multiple opportunities for personalization: Beyond its roots in southern hospitality, the Edley's brand and ethos is known for strong family ties and community. The team at Edley's wanted to gain access to human insights that are not easily visible to the naked eye.

The cost for a restaurant to acquire a new customer varies widely depending on the marketing strategies employed, the location of the restaurant, and the type of customers you are targeting. Calculating Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is crucial for restaurant owners and managers to determine the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and to manage their budgets efficiently.

In 2019, Edley's was not ready to spend Dollars on a multi-channel program marketing that is powered by technology and data. At that time their primary outbound marketing efforts were concentrated on public relations, local community building and inspiring brand awareness through social media channels like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

Adding a simple captive portal technology solution that allowed them to build brand awareness where guests are gathering, then easily activate each unique guest through smart emails segmentation and automations, gave Edley's the information they needed to start measuring the performance of their customer acquisition funnel.

Effective and accurate email segmentation.  When your customer database contains thousands of unique subscribers with a rich data set, segmentation is an essential practice to gain a clearer picture of your customer base. As Edley's new customer base grew, GoGoGuest created multiple customer segments or customer groups that meet Edley's ideal customer profile, including:

• Local customers within the 5 mile radius of each store location
• Locals who came in frequently (more than 1 visit)
• Guests with families
• Guests who are young professionals and single
• All-out-of-town guests

Through the years Edley's new customer acquisition data sources and data sets in the GoGoGuest platform expanded to include:

• Average purchase per visit
• Visit frequency
• Products frequently ordered each visit
• Residence

Advanced email marketing automation. With GoGoGuest, Edley's easily utilized advanced marketing automations that empowered a small marketing team to activate, engagem and re-engage each new subscriber with a customer journey that is personalized to their interaction with Edley's. Here are a few samples of marketing automations that restaurant marketing teams can easily implement in GoGoGuest.

• Welcome journey
• Birthday journey
• Re-engagement through a survey or review after each visit
• Introduction to other parts of the business that may be of interest to a customer
• Online ordering and delivery re-engagement journeys
• Recently, we added the ability to launch digital loyalty punch cards using our powerful automation tools.

Today, Edley's active and engaged customer base in the GoGoGuest platform is at over 100K.

Restaurateurs who capitalize on personalization based customer marketing can orchestrate tailored marketing strategies, from crafting special events for frequent visitors to refining the loyalty programs, pricing and array of dishes served.

This level of customization ensures that each guest interaction is not just a transaction, but a step forward in building a robust and loyal customer base.

A digital marketing strategy that is pandemic proof

Since joining GoGoGuest in September 2019 (pre-pandemic times), Edley’s has developed an incredible community of active email subscribers that have added new life to its marketing strategy – which remained ever more active during the pandemic. For a company that did not have a defined digital marketing strategy and relied mostly on public relations and social media for sharing, adding GoGoGuest to the restaurant's technology marketing stack has been powerful.

Since 2019, Edley’s BBQ achieved:

• Grew their active customer base from 1,000 unique subscribers to over 20,000 unique diners. Today, Edley's subscriber base is at over 100K.
• 97% customer engagement
• Sent out nearly 10.3 million emails and 55.9% open rates, resulting in an increase of 15% growth in email marketing performance year-over-year
• Increased average purchases made via the email marketing channel by 28%
• SMS marketing continues to be a part of the Edley's local and holiday customer engagement programs

“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 grow our audience base efficiently and get the word out about our unique offerings. ”Edley’s has no plans to stop there. The brand is currently working on new customer marketing programs."  

From zero outbound marketing to effective multi-channel customer programs

Information empowers restaurateurs to gain control of their marketing budget and how that is efficiently allocated across different customer programs.

With better information about their diners, Edley's has embarked in local marketing programs at the store level while pairing their high-touch customer programs with digital marketing campaigns using email marketing, SMS marketing and a strong social media presence.

• Weekly specials that is unique for each store location
• Bonus gift cards that is very popular during the holiday season
• Drink specials mid-week
• A strong catering program

By consistently connecting with their customer base with conversational and personalized digital content that complements the restaurant's signature southern hospitality vibe, the Edley's team achieved revenue growth that is on track with their 30%+ year-over-year growth rate during the pre-pandemic years.

Building a strong customer base with data and human insights

Data-driven marketing can significantly bolster a restaurant's efforts to build a devoted customer base. By leveraging the insights gained from customers' engagement and buying behaviors and preferences, restaurants can craft experiences tailored to not only attract diners but also to ensure they keep coming back.

Customer data management seamlessly integrated with segmentation and automation workflows

One key to this puzzle is the robust data obtained from in-store (POS), online ordering systems, eCommerce and the customer's digital footprint around your brand. As customers lean into the convenience and access that technology brings, restaurants benefit from a treasure trove of data that helps optimize customer programs, menu offerings and spot sales trends.

In early 2020, Edley's started testing GoGoGuest's Customer Data Platform (CDP) then eventually integrated it as part of Edley's technology marketing stack. This new product offering from GoGoGuest made it possible to gain a cohesive customer view to deeply personalize customer programs.

GoGoGuest's CDP is closely integrated with our email marketing and SMS marketing solutions. This means a restaurant operator can easily set specific rules based on the insights learned to update the identified customer groups, recommend new ones and best of all, activate the automations associated with each customer group.

Execution becomes magical when personalization is a fully automated workflow. All your restaurant marketing needs to do is to look out for outliers, new opportunities and eventually update some of the messaging associated with each automation, to keep things fresh.

Turning data into actionable restaurant marketing opportunities

By implementing GoGoGuest's Customer Data Platform (CDP), Edley's gained valuable insights to further tailor marketing strategies, enhance the guest experience, and grow revenue.  Best of all, customer marketing and personalization is fully automated.

The benefits:

• A lean restaurant marketing team can be hyper-effective and efficient as a brand's number of units expand
• Your marketing team can easily develop a playbook and scale the customer marketing programs across markets, with consideration to localizing some of the content.
• Extend the ROI of your technology marketing stack and investments.
• Access the same level of data for other data-driven projects including research on new sites, advertising personalization and more

Can GoGoGuest do the same for your restaurant business?

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, restaurants can:

• Own their own first-party data.
• Create “network effects” across their locations and brands.
• Motivate guests to take action across multiple channels, including email, SMS, and ads.
• Efficiently run customer marketing programs that deliver ROI.
• Provide the solutions needed by your marketing team to create success for your business.

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.

Next Steps

Ready to see what GoGoGuest can do for your business? Sign up for a subscription or book  an appointment for a live demo with one of our professional digital marketing consultants.