Operators are merging the online and offline worlds together to offer a personalized brand experience.
February 1, 2019
Sponsored Content
Consumers lead a double life, offline and online. Offline, they visit restaurants with friends and family – or stop in for a quick bite on their lunch break. Online, they search for places to eat, use social media to post photos and opinions about their experiences, sign up for loyalty program perks and rewards, and look up new restaurants in their area.
The data collected with each of these interactions can help foodservice establishments truly understand their customers. For restaurant marketers, the challenge lies in connecting information across online and offline channels, so they can know and target real people online and then measure that transaction offline. This enables the business to gain a unified view of the customer, including food preferences, past orders, dietary restrictions, and relevant purchase history in other categories. With these insights, restaurant marketers can develop the right messaging for each individual, offering the consumer a personalized brand experience across interaction points.
And personalization is the key to truly connecting with customers, thus driving visits and sales. According to a 2017 report from Evergage, 88 percent of U.S. marketers reported seeing measurable improvements due to personalization, with more than half reporting a lift greater than 10 percent.
How do restaurants stack up? To learn more, Epsilon-Conversant partnered with Informa Engage and Nation’s Restaurant News on a survey of restaurant owners and operators. The findings, available in a recently released white paper entitled “Driving one more visit: How restaurant marketers fare in the digital age,”reveal how restaurants currently use customer data for marketing tactics and where they can improve. Here, we take a look at a few of the findings and why omni-channel personalization is the next major frontier for restaurant marketers.
Operators seek to better understand their customers
The survey showed that 70 percent of restaurant owners and operators deem personalization in their marketing efforts either “extremely” or “very” important. A more unified view of the customer allows marketers to accurately personalize messaging for each individual, leading to increased foot traffic and sales.
Many restaurant operators know they should do more than just collect data, but the next step — combining data from disparate sources — is the real challenge. The survey showed that only 18 percent of respondents are extremely confident in their understanding of who their customers are after they leave the restaurant. The same percentage are extremely confident in their ability to provide a relevant experience to their customers across all channels. This concept is crucial for personalization as operators need to know who their customers are to develop effective messaging and to reach individuals outside of the restaurant.
Another challenge is that restaurant marketers are not certain that they are reaching consumers and that their marketing efforts are resulting in sales. Only 15 percent said they are extremely confident in their understanding of if their marketing is successful at driving sales, which ties into not fully understanding whom marketers are reaching and if their efforts made an impact.
But customer behavior is highly fragmented and difficult to follow
From a measurement perspective, today’s customer’s journey is more disjointed than ever across different channels and devices. Consumers’ screen time suggests that advertisers have several opportunities to reach customers via websites, apps, search engine ads, and other channels. The challenge is that cookies, which store unique searches on one device and are often used for retargeting ads, are not enough because people use several devices as part of one decision to visit a restaurant.
According to IAB research created in conjunction with Conversant, Forrester, and comScore, the typical consumer owns more than four web-connected devices. Knowing and accurately identifying real people — not just location or cookie-based targeting — is an important part of effective digital marketing, but it gets more complex every day as new channels and means of communication emerge.
For example, a person could have a smartphone, work laptop, and tablet — three devices — but if they visit a restaurant’s site in different browsers on all three devices, they could have three browser cookies that consider each cookie instance as a different person. This creates wasted ad spend and a poor customer experience because the marketer would be retargeting each cookie with ads, thinking it was three different people instead of three devices associated with one individual.
This concept showed in the survey, where operators say they are not engaging with their customers well. When asked about personalizing marketing communications, offers and coupons based on the days of the week and times of day their customers are most engaged, only 30 percent say they do this extremely well or very well. As for personalizing based on the types of marketing channels consumers engage with most, only 27 percent say they do this extremely well or very well.
Unifying customer data for true personalization
Digital marketing offers the promise of true personalization, but the key to doing this well is tying together disparate information and making it actionable. That involves bringing together first-party CRM data with third-party data, such as historical spending, purchase information, spending in other categories, etc., to create a single, unified view of current and potential customers online and offline. The most successful digital efforts connect CRM information to known users across online and offline channels, and then are able to accurately measure the full impact.
Most restaurants can leverage information from orders at the restaurant, loyalty programs, and online orders, but they’re missing a whole other side of the customer without that third-party data visibility into historical spend, spend with competitors, and purchases in other categories. True personalization requires a unified view of the consumer, and CRM information on its own isn’t enough. By pairing first- and third-party information, operators can truly know to whom they are speaking, personalize the experience, help drive sales and in-store traffic, and be able to measure results so marketers know they are spending wisely and can show the impact.
