Database Marketing
The big restaurant chains are all over database marketing. Find yourself on the Pizza Express list and you’ll get 2 or 3 emails a month just reminding you that they still exist, and that you should drop in sometime.
Pizza Express doesn’t send emails for fun. They do it because they know that by keeping in touch with their customers, they’ll keep their brand top of mind, and by sending emails to enough people they’ll reach some people who are just thinking about what to do for dinner tonight.
Most small, independent restaurants don’t have the luxury of a marketing team, and most restaurant-owners open up a restaurant because they want to run a restaurant, not because they aspire to be database marketing experts.
Whether they like it or not, every business owner is first and foremost a marketer of their business, and a restaurant owner is no different. If nobody’s sat in the restaurant it doesn’t matter what the food tastes like or how great the service is.
Not having a customer database simply doesn’t make any sense but the uncomfortable fact is that most UK restaurants don’t know anything about their customers – let alone have them on a database.
If someone has just eaten in your restaurant, and you’ve provided them with good food and service, there’s every chance that they’re going to return. If they had an enjoyable experience, they might visit the restaurant 2 or 3 times a year. Now, if you can turn that 2 or 3 times a year visitor into a 5 or 6 times a year visitor, just by keeping in touch with them, that would be a smart and entirely sensible thing to do. After all, we’re talking about major percentage uplifts in profit here.
Even if it cost you £3 or £4 a year to keep in touch with that customer, you’d still do it, wouldn’t you? Of course you would.
The cost of getting an existing customer to buy from you again is MUCH lower than the cost of acquiring that customer in the first place.
Fred Reichheld, an authority on Customer Loyalty (check out his books, The Loyalty Effect and Loyalty Rules!) suggests that the cost of acquiring a new customer is 6 to 7 times more than the cost of retaining an existing customer.
We’ve developed a foolproof way of capturing customer data that makes it dead easy for any restaurant to very quickly build a valuable database of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of customers.