Benefits of marketing automation for restaurants
Marketing automation stats restaurants should know
12 examples of restaurant marketing automations
Imagine having unlimited time and resources to develop marketing campaigns for every single restaurant guest based on their unique behavior. This is precisely what marketing automation unlocks—it turns one-to-one marketing from an aspiration to a reality.
Why is personalization so important? Because people want to feel seen. In a recent survey , restaurant guests said personalized recommendations (70%) and emails featuring their name (59%) made them feel known. When guests feel connected to your brand, they’re more likely to return and spend more.
It’s one of the reasons leading restaurants like Ted's Montana Grill and First Watch have largely moved away from batch-and-blast guest communications to hyper-targeted automations powered by data.
Here are a few ways restaurants can benefit from marketing automation.
For further proof of its effectiveness, look at the following statistics.
When done correctly, marketing automation can help you drive restaurant guests further down the funnel to habituation, all based on their unique interactions with your brand.
It’s important to clearly define your objective and how you plan to influence guest behavior before launching a marketing automation. To achieve your desired outcome, you must reach a subset of guests at the ideal time on their preferred marketing channel—with impactful messaging.
Ask yourself the following questions to get the most bang for your buck.
Journey orchestration
Once you have a game plan, you can develop targeted, timely automations to nudge each guest archetype toward your desired business outcomes. Keep scrolling for some restaurant-specific examples.
A high-spending guest who orders three times a year shouldn’t receive the same marketing message as a low-spending but consistent regular. The same goes for meat lovers and vegetarians.
With your GDP, you can create complex guest segments—by purchase behavior, order frequency, dietary preferences, preferred marketing channel, and more—and use marketing automation to influence their behavior.
Here are some examples of automations you can set up by guest archetype.
Now that you’ve got some inspiration for guest segments and automations, let’s get into the building blocks of marketing automation.
With a restaurant-specific marketing automation tool , you can get started in a few steps.
1. Set trigger: The action, behavior, or event that prompts the automation
2. Pre-entry filter: Additional conditions a guest must meet to be eligible for the automation
3. Entry recurrence: Frequency in which guests enter the automation when meeting other criteria
4. Add action: Final output of the automation received by the guest
No matter how familiar you are with automations, Olo Engage can help you level up and scale your restaurant’s one-to-one marketing program. By leveraging Olo’s GDP and Marketing solutions, you can build automated guest journeys with behavior-based personalization and maximize campaign ROI.
“If you have insight into purchase behaviors, dietary restrictions, payments, and preferences all in one place, you can drive guest lifetime value,” said Ray Gallagher, VP & GM Engage. “When you serve guests the right information at the right time, you can influence their behavior—like increasing order frequency and check average—long-term.”
For more information about how marketing automation can save your restaurant time and drive revenue, request a demo of Olo Engage .
Photo by Ono Kosuki at Pexels
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