Primanti Bros. drives double-digit lift in visits, spend with AI to IA℠ Missed Visit Score
When Covid-19 upended the restaurant industry, Pittsburgh-based sandwich chain Primanti Bros. used the Paytronix Missed Visit score to send rich offers to lapsed guests. The campaign drove a 90% increase in guest visits and 50% increase in spend.
Even with its loyal fan base, Primanti Bros. was not immune to the effects of Covid-19. The 40-unit chain closed its dining rooms in mid-March, and immediately turned to its CRM to communicate with guests – and to entice them back.
Leaning on Data
All things considered, Primanti Bros. weathered the first few months of the pandemic well. By early summer, the casual full-service restaurants’ most loyal fans had returned to pre-Covid visit frequency.
Even so, the brand was still seeing an unusually high number of lapsed guests – those who were not visiting at their typical pre-Covid regularity.
To combat this the Primanti team built a campaign using the Missed Visit score, which tracks guests’ visits to determine if they’ve fallen out of their regular pattern.
The campaign segmented guests who had missed one or more visits into four groups. Three groups received offers for $5, $8, or $10 off their next purchase within seven days, no strings attached. The fourth group acted as a control and was not given an offer.
Primanti Bros. worked closely with the Paytronix Data Insights team to identify the optimal guest segments and offers.
“The Data Insights team allows me to have a deeper understanding of loyalty – their analysis helps us to maximize each campaign,” Wilkinson explained.
The results
The results of the short campaign were even better than Primanti Bros. had expected: on average, guests who received an offer visited at nearly twice the rate of the control group, a 90% visit increase.
The campaign also performed exceedingly well compared to industry benchmarks. While top-tier reengagement results for campaigns like this one hover at about 13%, Primanti Bros. drove 16% reengagement across the three offers.
“The results far exceeded what we were initially hoping for,” Wilkinson said. “We had really strong reengagement. Not only did we win the customer back, those customers that we won back visited us a subsequent time.”
Part of Primanti’s success lay in the its willingness to offer its guests rich rewards. While the incentives in this campaign were big, the brand still saw a positive return on investment in addition to driving sustained lift in visits.
“We’ve never really been afraid of giving our guests rich offers,” Wilkinson explained. “While we are committed to offers and trying to drive foot traffic, we’re also hyper-focused on trying to make sure there’s a positive ROI.”