How to Increase Brand Awareness for a Restaurant: 10 Tips
Ever wondered why restaurants like KFC or Chick-fil-A always seem top of mind even if you've never tried their food? It’s because of their strong...
Platform
Combining online ordering, loyalty, omnichannel messaging, AI insights, and payments in one platform. Paytronix delivers relevant, personal experiences, at scale, that help improve your entire digital marketing funnel by creating amazing frictionless experiences.
A Complete Customer Experience Platform
Online Ordering
Acquire new customers and capture valuable data with industry leading customization features.
Loyalty
Encourage More visits and higher spend with personalized promotions based on individual activity and preferences.
CRM
Build great customer relationships with relevant personal omnichannel campaigns delivered at scale.
Artificial Intelligence
Leverage the most data from the most customer transactions to power 1:1 marketing campaigns and drive revenue.
Payments
Drive brand engagement by providing fast, frictionless guest payments.
Solutions
We use data, customer experience expertise, and technology to solve everyday restaurant and convenience store challenges.
Contactless Experiences
Accommodate your guests' changing preferences by providing safe, efficient service whether dining-in or taking out.
Customer Insights
Collect guest data and analyze behaviors to develop powerful targeted campaigns that produce amazing results.
Marketing Automation
Create and test campaigns across channels and segments to drive loyalty, incremental visits, and additional revenue.
Mobile Experiences
Provide convenient access to your brand, menus and loyalty program to drive retention with a branded or custom app.
Subscriptions
Create a frictionless, fun way to reward your most loyal customers for frequent visits and purchases while normalizing revenues.
Employee Dining
Attract and retain your employees with dollar value or percentage-based incentives and tiered benefits.
Order Experience Builder
Create powerful interactive, and appealing online menus that attract and acquire new customers simply and easily.
Loyalty Programs
High-impact customizable programs that increase spend, visit, and engagement with your brand.
Online Ordering
Maximize first-party digital sales with an exceptional guest experience.
Integrations
Launch your programs with more than 450 existing integrations.
Loyalty Programs
Deliver the same care you do in person with all your digital engagements.
Online Ordering
Drive more first-party orders and make it easy for your crew.
Loyalty Programs
Digital transformations start here - get to know your guests.
Online Ordering
Add a whole new sales channel to grow your business - digital ordering is in your future.
Integrations
We work with your environment - check it out.
Company
We are here to help clients build their businesses by delivering amazing experiences for their guests.
Meet The Team
Our exceptional customer engagement innovations are delivered by a team of extraordinary people.
News/Press
A collection of press and media about our innovations, customers, and people.
Events
A schedule of upcoming tradeshows, conferences, and events that we will participate in.
Careers
Support
Paytronix Login
Order & Delivery Login
Resources
Learn how to create great customer experiences with our free eBooks, webinars, articles, case studies, and customer interviews.
See Our Product In Action
E-Books
Learn more about topics important to the restaurant and c-store customer experience.
Webinars
Watch brief videos for tips and strategies to connect with your customers.
Case Studies
Learn how brands have used the Paytronix platform to increase revenue and engage with guests.
Reports
See how your brand stacks up against industry benchmarks, analysis, and research.
Blog
Catch up with our team of in-house experts for quick articles to help your business.
Attract More Dream Customers and Keep Them Longer
5 min read
Feb 20, 2024
One major challenge restaurants and convenience stores still face in 2024 is providing personalized and memorable experiences for off-premises guests.
Fortunately, advanced personalization tools that collect data from first-party ordering platforms make it easier than ever to make off-premises experiences feel like in-person ones. These tools can drive order frequency by as much as 30 percent, win back dissatisfied guests, and help brands get more out of their marketing budgets.
Personalization begins and ends with data. It's about understanding your customer base through data insights, and leveraging those learnings to drive deeper engagement. Transforming your numbers into insights ensures your marketing efforts and other aspects of the guest experience resonate with guests on a personal level.
Segmentation is the key to enabling personalization. Segmentation means dividing guests by certain actionable factors. Typically, guest segments are based on a single factor, like visit frequency, average spend, or commonly ordered items. This approach has served the industry well, enabling marketers to run simple campaigns based on guests' visit frequency or sales history. But in today's guest engagement landscape, marketers have access to more holistic metrics like total visits, average check size, average days between visits, and likelihood to lapse. These metrics enable marketers to be more exacting with their promotions, increasing ROI.
AI makes it easier for marketers to execute personalized campaigns. With AI, operators can instantly segment guests based on a wide range of proven and predicted behaviors. The result is a series of actionable segments that can help marketers motivate desired actions through timely, personalized, and relevant messages. Personalizing guest relationships drives repeat business and gives guests more reasons to develop a natural affinity for your brand.
At Paytronix, we’ve been tracking three data- and insight-driven personalization techniques that are proving to be best practices for deepening guest relationships. These include loyalty integration, menu engineering, and automated surveys.
According to Restaurant Dive, data-driven personalization will be key to restaurant loyalty programs in 2024. But emotional connections to brands are dropping, according to a recent report from Salesforce, which found rates dropped from 62% in 2022 to 54% in 2023. Operators must do all they can today to keep their best guests happy.
Loyalty is a great way to maintain guest satisfaction and engagement. Integrating your loyalty program with online ordering can also increase order frequency by 18-30%. Leveraging guest behavior data and using AI and machine learning to create personalized marketing campaigns, operators can get the right messages to the right guests at the right times.
Smashburger, for example—a Denver-based burger chain with more than 227 stores across the US—personalized its loyalty program by “micro-segmenting” its customer base.
“Instead of just blasting guests with communications screaming about the Smash Club program, we … tailor communications to what guests enjoy,” said Loyalty Manager Lexi Ryan. “Offers are tied to core behavior so that guests get what they love.”
With its data-driven and AI-powered campaigns designed to boost order frequency, Smashburger developed a far more profitable campaign structure, while providing rewards that are statistically likely to resonate with guests.
Almost everyone is accustomed to getting recommendations when they’re shopping online or deciding what movies to watch. Your guests expect the same treatment when figuring out what to eat.
To personalize the online ordering experience, operators can leverage data about guests’ previous orders to display evident favorites, along with additional items that complement their regular choices. Known as menu clustering, this popular AI-powered activity turns upsell opportunities into real revenue.
Menu clustering identifies items that are commonly bought together, such as fuel and coffee at a convenience store, or rice bowls and lettuce wraps at a Chinese restaurant. Then the online ordering feature issues recommendations for a customer to consider before checking out.
Segmenting guests based on what menu items they typically bundle together allows marketers to act strategically. They can choose an item or category they’d like to grow—such as a new burger, or milkshakes—and pair it with a guests’ favorite item to sweeten the deal.
Another burger brand used menu clustering to market a new, limited-time burger to guests based on their behaviors around four key food segments—meals, fries, shakes, and vegetable-based items.
The marketing team launched four unique campaigns and provided guests with uniquely relevant offers. The operator achieved a 61x ROI with this approach, and avoided missteps that might have alienated guests, such as offering a discount on a beef burger to a vegetarian. Most important, menu clustering helped the brand achieve the following objectives around the new offering:
Menu-variant testing, also known as menu analysis or menu engineering, is another technique that can help you tailor your online ordering menu for individual guests. It’s a great way to optimize menu design for profitability and gauge the reception of new menu items, and the more you know about your guests, the more informed your menu variant testing will be.
One of the best things about menu variant testing is that you can simultaneously test an infinite number of menu variations to as many guest segments as you want, and the AI will tell you which of your tests are the most profitable.
Let’s say you operate a restaurant where pizza is a big draw. With menu variant testing, you can try one menu that puts pizza front-and-center, so guests don’t have to scroll to find it. You could also try putting pizza behind your appetizers to encourage guests to add other items to their order before they get to the pizza. And you could create another, simplified menu that only features items a guest normally buys. No matter what creative ideas you come up with, the system will tell you which are the most effective.
The goal of menu variant testing is to remove items that are unpopular and unprofitable. Popularity is determined by the number of sales, and profitability is determined by comparing an item’s contribution margin (selling price minus food cost) to the average contribution margin of all items. For items that are popular but unprofitable, operators may try to increase their contribution margins without impacting sales.
According to Nation’s Restaurant News, only 43% of operators obtain data from guest surveys that request feedback on order quality, temperature, timeliness, and other characteristics.
While many guests don’t respond to surveys, those who do provide valuable information you can use to improve the overall guest experience. Lots of guests appreciate when you ask them how their order was and if there are any ways you can improve—especially when there’s an incentive to get a special deal on a future visit for completing the survey.
Operators use surveys to gather insights, build richer guest profiles, and make improvements to keep guests happy, but surveys can be difficult to deploy and manage. Thanks to new AI-powered tools, however, surveys and follow-ups can be automated. This newfound flexibility is one of the reasons surveys are a big personalization trend for 2024.
If a guest tells you in a survey they had a great experience, you can send them an AI-generated thank-you with an offer attached. And if another guest was dissatisfied with their order, you can send an automatic apology with a special deal for giving you a second chance.
Operators who send sincere apologies benefit from significant service recovery, with apology recipients returning more frequently and leaving more positive feedback after future visits.
Personalized online ordering is becoming increasingly important for restaurants and c-stores in 2024, but most operators aren’t using data as wisely as they should be. Nation’s Restaurant News reported that 7 out of 10 operators question whether they're optimizing their guest data.
By leveraging advanced tools that collect information and use AI and machine learning to create personalized marketing campaigns, rewards, and menu options, operators can increase order frequency, anticipate future needs, and keep customers who may have had a negative experience.
Techniques such as loyalty program integration, menu engineering, and automated surveys are proven techniques for deepening guest relationships. By showing guests you understand their needs and desires, you’ll be able to drive more revenue from happier guests who maintain an emotional connection to your brand.
Ever wondered why restaurants like KFC or Chick-fil-A always seem top of mind even if you've never tried their food? It’s because of their strong...
From credit card transactions to mobile payments, the way your customers pay for their meals plays a critical role in your restaurant's daily...
In today’s world, food delivery platforms like Grubhub have become a major convenience for both diners and restaurants. As one of the most prominent...