Stephen Stone

Today’s customers can be your best friend or worst enemy. In an age where one shared bad experience can go viral and bring heaps of negative attention onto a brand, it’s important to understand what’s bringing customers through your front doors and what’s driving them away. As a frequent restaurant visitor, I’ve experienced behaviors from brands that were more likely to turn me elsewhere than to bring me in to eat.

Here are three reasons why I may have stopped eating at your restaurant:

1. You sent me kids offers before I had children. Kids eat free promotions are a great way to drive traffic from families, particularly on days when business is slower than usual. However, if you’re running this kind of campaign, make sure that it’s going to guests who can take advantage of it. Without the means to collect data and segment your audience, you end up sending offers like this to everyone, which all-but guarantees any guest without kids will avoid your brand on a night when families with children make up a large percentage of the dining room.   […]

Devin Handler, the director of marketing for Garbanzo Mediterranean Fresh, joined us and shared some insights on how the company’s loyalty program is driving visits.

Paytronix: Tell us about you and Garbanzo Mediterranean Fresh.

Handler: Garbanzo is a 20-unit quick-casual concept based in Denver, Colorado. High-growth mode is our MO, as we come off of 2017 having increased same-store sales by 6.5%.

Our marketing mix includes radio, print, and, of course, our loyalty program. The driver that stands out among the mix is what we can do with the more than 100,000 members of our V.I.B. [Very Important Bean] Rewards Program.  

I came to Garbanzo a little more than a year ago from Qdoba Restaurant Corporation, where I was director of field marketing for five years and, before that, brand manager for almost two years. I have been working in restaurant marketing since 2010. […]

Utilize a strategic framework and leverage adaptable guest engagement tools to operationalize guest loyalty in an ever-changing marketplace. MonkeyMedia and The Catering Institute offer a playbook for today’s unprecedented consumer demand for takeout, delivery and catering – the off-premise paradigm shift.

We recently invited Erle Dardick and Mo Asgari of The Catering Institute and Monkey Media Software to join Paytronix in a discussion on building lifetime loyalty, with a focus on the guest engagement tools helping today’s brands earn loyalty and repeat business. The conversation explored which brands are the best at leveraging technology to keep customers engaged. We discussed how the strategy must evolve to follow guests through the various stages of their lives.

Erle and Mo provided a playbook for tapping into today’s unprecedented consumer demand for takeout, delivery, and catering—the off-premise paradigm shift. […]

Today we are talking with Paytronix power-user Devin Handler, director of marketing, Garbanzo Mediterranean Fresh, about how his loyalty program is driving more sales and visits.

Listen to the Paytronix Webinar, “What the Heck Happened: Recapping 2017’s Challenges and Identifying 2018’s Solutions,” to hear more about Garbanzo’s loyalty best practices.

Can you give us some background on the Garbanzo V.I.B. Rewards Club?

Garbanzo has 27 units and approximately 110,000 members segmented into various bands in the V.I.B. Rewards Club. Not all restaurants participate because their POS systems don’t integrate with our Paytronix-powered rewards program. We encourage members to interact with us in whatever way makes them comfortable, whether that’s a physical badge on their key chain or through our mobile app.

At Garbanzo, we believe that simple is best.  And, like the food we serve, our interactions at every touchpoint should be simple, fresh and friendly – including and especially our rewards program. We make it easy for them to join our V.I.B. Rewards Club any way they want – digitally, analog or some combination of both. […]