Building customer loyalty and lifetime value through cross-channel, one-to-one marketing is the marketer’s equivalent of the Holy Grail. This is certainly true for restaurant brands, given the need for every competitive advantage in winning share of consumers’ scaled-back eating-out budgets.
But achieving one-to-one marketing cost-effectively can sometimes seem as elusive as finding the legendary Grail.
Papa Gino’s, Inc., the privately owned parent of the eponymous pizza chain and the D’Angelo Grilled Sandwiches chain—which together have more than 370 locations, primarily in the Northeast—set about its own one-to-one quest late last year, in conjunction with launching a new loyalty rewards program and investing in new technology.
The company had data for hundreds of thousands of customers, including opt-in emails collected via its existing online rewards and ordering systems—and replacing an outdated physical punch-card system with a magnetic-strip swipe cards for in-restaurant rewards redemptions added the ability to capture customer data for those transactions, as well.
However, targeting and tailored messaging capabilities were lacking. “We’d been sending email blasts, but on a broad, generic basis,” says Michael McManama, SVP brand development for Papa Gino’s, Inc.
The ultimate goal: Create measurable, highly interactive customer relationships on a large scale in order to drive memberships/ activations for the new rewards program, and then build usage frequency. To achieve those objectives, the company wanted to send targeted, personalized offers to loyal customers, and employ transactions and other customer behavior data to respond immediately with subsequent targeted offers.
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