Shari’s is a chain of family dining restaurants in the Western U.S.
Michael Kiriazis, VP of Marketing for Shari’s, participated in a compelling Q&A with Loyalty360 to share some thoughts about loyalty, customer experience, and customer engagement.
How do you define loyalty, what does it mean to your organization, how has it changed over recent years or since you have been on the job?
For us, loyalty is a simple concept. Gain repeat visits from our guests by creating an environment in which they want to return.
In the past, we relied on our core brand promise of serving great food with outstanding service in a comfortable setting. While this still holds true today, we need to complement it with some new innovative marketing tools. And our Shari’s Café Club is one of those. It’s our Loyalty program that rewards guests with their frequency. The more they dine with us, the more we reward them with points, which they can spend on their meals.
We also offer our Café Club members various seasonal offers of fresh, northwest Limited Time Offerings, like our award-winning Blueberry Sour Cream lemon pie, which is in our restaurants now–but just while the blueberries are fresh!
This Café Club allows us to engage with our guests on a frequent basis. It also allows us to work with each guest as individuals, giving them rewards that are relevant only to them, because we understand their dining habits as individuals. So it allows us to really hone in on specifics that talk to each guest, not just a shotgun approach.
What are your challenges or opportunities in the next two years?
The big challenges facing us today is embracing the digital age of marketing and social media. Family dining traditional serves an older demographic. And while we want to continue interacting with that group, we want to engage with younger people–with families and bring Shari’s into their consideration set.
Digital and social media is a key initiative to that goal. That’s why we’re committed to exploring and growing our digital/social media presence. And we consider the Café Club loyalty program a key part of that digital presence.
We’ve embraced this media segment and have a team dedicated to managing and growing our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. and Café Club.
This is both a challenge and a great opportunity. It’s a challenge because it’s a continuously changing media environment. But it also provides us with a great opportunity for smart engagement with our guests and allows us to communicate with them on a daily basis.
What will be the biggest challenge facing marketers in the next three to five years?
I think the biggest challenge over the next few years is really the same challenge we’ve faced over the past 30 years–determining the best and most effective way to communicate with guests in a very crowded media environment. Sure we have many different media vehicles today. But we’ve always had to figure out how to break through the advertising and marketing clutter and stand out against our competitors.
This is both a challenge and a great opportunity. It’s a challenge because it’s a continuously changing media environment. But it also provides us with a great opportunity for smart engagement with our guests and allows us to communicate with them on a daily basis.
And we’re continuously challenged with measuring the effectiveness of our marketing spend. In some ways, it’s become a bit easier to quantifiably measure a digital medium by “clicks” or “likes” or “page loads”, etc.
But it’s still a business in which the ultimate measurement is getting “butts in the seats”. And that measurement never changes. The biggest challenge is determining what’s working and what’s not. And regardless of the media environment, that’s been a marketing challenge for decades (or longer).
Can you offer our audience a high-level overview of your customer philosophy and share how this perspective helps drive more effective engagement and, thereby, better marketing outcomes?
We have what we call “The 100 Club”. It’s a club in which our servers know the names and favorite dishes of 100 of our regular guests. All of our servers participate in this club–and we have many servers that know HUNDREDS of our guests and their favorite dishes. Now, this is not about our servers, but it’s all about the fact that we treat our guests as friends and family. And it’s not “lip service”, because we KNOW them. We know their names, their favorite pie and even their grandkids’ names. That level of customer engagement philosophy permeates through our entire corporation. And that’s why our guest loyalty program is so successful … it’s more than just a card with rewards. It’s a way of life for us and our guests.
As a side note to this, Shari’s Café & Pies has always had one of the lowest employee turnover rates in the industry. This helps our guests to feel at home with their favorite server, manager or even BOH employee.
In a customer-centric era, if you could give one piece of advice to a brand to help them increase loyalty and engagement with their customers; what would it be? What would it have been two years ago and what might it be in two years?
Know your guests. Understand them demographically, and psychographically. And most importantly, have a conversation with them, not at them. Make it a two-way, interactive conversation–don’t just throw the same message to everyone in a shotgun approach. Target and tailor individual messages as much as you can.
This marketing advice is timeless. It was accurate a decade ago and I think will be relevant in a decade.