When it comes to marketing, pizza and delivery restaurants have an unfair advantage over other restaurant concepts. Seriously unfair: the kind of competitive advantage savvy companies use to eat up market share.
But unfair as it may seem to your competitors, it’s a completely legitimate by-product of your business model—a secret weapon built right into every delivery operation.
Unfortunately, too many restaurant operators fail to recognize what they have. Instead of using it to dominate their markets, they ignore it and let it gather dust.
It’s kind of understandable. After all, it doesn’t look like a weapon. And it’s not all that easy to pick up.
That’s because a delivery concept’s unfair advantage is information. Guest intelligence. The built-in database of guest information you need to deliver pizzas (or anything) to your customers’ homes.
It’s the kind of information that other restaurant concepts have to work really hard to collect from their guests—usually with limited success. Your guests? They offer it up easily, without question. And where other restaurant POS systems may not track guest information effectively, your pizza and delivery POS is built for the job.
But here’s the problem. To put this particular competitive advantage to work, you have to use it—designing marketing campaigns to drive bounceback, increase market share, reward frequent guests, and recover lapsed customers.
The reason these types of campaigns give you such an unfair advantage is that they really work: for a fraction of what you pay for a mass mailing or ad campaign, you can bring in 7 to 10 times the response rate. On top of that, database marketing campaigns like this are easily automated—so there’s minimal work involved.
But many delivery concepts don’t take the time to set up effective database marketing campaigns. And when they finally attempt it, many find that the quality of data they’re collecting makes it difficult or impossible: when we look at their guest data, we find missing zip codes and email addresses, notes in the address fields, misspellings and missing last names.
Are you capturing complete guest information—in-store and online—and paying attention to accuracy? Do you have an automated database marketing program in place? If not, you’re throwing away one of your greatest competitive advantages. And that’s truly unfair.
