If you are after higher customer retention rates and building sustainable business growth for your QSR, then you need to focus on your long-term approach to marketing and personalization. Building a strategy for scale is all about taking advantage of data and leading forward with an omnichannel marketing approach.
The better you can personalize your offerings and messaging to individuals, the more meaningful that experience will be for your customers. With better satisfaction rates, your loyalty program will grow, you will see better engagement across digital channels, and your brand will develop a better reputation in the consumer market.
There is enormous competition in the hospitality industry, and it’s not enough just to offer quality food and good service. Customers are looking for dynamic, interactive brand identities that speak to their specific preferences and offer them personalized gifts.
For a QSR to stand out in the busy crowd, they will need to harness all the power of personalized marketing and use their creative assets to put it to practice across their entire customer ecosystem.
How to Execute a Successful Marketing Campaign
Personalization at scale may seem like a bit of a paradox – after all, how can you take an individualized approach while also widening your pool and breadth of customers?
Simply put, it is possible through meaningful customer segmentation, leveraging automation technology, and setting out measurable goals.
“Building a successful strategy is all about understanding customer behaviors and trends, and then knowing when and how to ignite different touchpoints to get them engaged with your brand,” says Kerri Linderboom, Customer Success Manager for TASK Groups Plexure division.
Here are the primary points your brand will need to cover when creating scaled marketing campaigns for your QSR.
Put data at the center of your campaign
When collected and analyzed accurately, data can be the single most powerful tool for understanding your customers and capturing your audience’s attention.
To build a true image of who your customers are, what they like, and how they behave, it’s essential to streamline data collection across all QSR marketing channels. The types of data you should be collecting and leveraging include:
- Transactional Data
- Demographic Data (location, age, gender, occupation, affluence, etc.)
- Customer Journey Data
- Order and Sales Data
- Behavioral data
Combining all this information will help you develop a clear picture of what your customers want, allowing you to create an effective marketing strategy to directly fill their needs.
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Connect the dots with reporting dashboards and predictive analytics
The key to using data effectively is to collect and use every piece of information your customers offer to you throughout their entire journey with your brand.
As Kerri explains, “The cumulative customer data, from which emails they open to when they purchase to how much food they order at one time, all help paint an overall picture of that individual’s behavior, needs and preferences.”
Connecting the dots is not just inferring preferences based on surface-level information, such as their gender or age, but is instead a robust understanding of individual trends based on behavioral data. To achieve this, brands will need a fully integrated digital system to collect, collate, and analyze data across all channels.
Identify consumer segments and their preferences
Accurate segmentation is key to being able to offer personalization at scale for your customers and deliver an effective marketing campaign. Segmentation involves grouping customers based on similar traits, personalities, needs, behaviors, and other factors. That way, brands do not have to target every customer individually but instead can personalize at a more manageable scale.
Customer segments can be made using a combination of different insights, including:
- Behavior patterns – what, when, and how much a customer orders
- Demographic details – what a person’s ‘persona’ as a parent, teenager, or senior might indicate about their preferences
- Behavioral triggers – overall data from each touchpoint about what typically motivates a certain kind of purchase
- Cluster analysis – knowing what order items different customers will group together
The key with segmentation is to keep it based in data rather than assumptions. Brands often fall into the trap of exclusively following demographics, which can lead to unfairly stereotyping customers and making them bad offers. Instead, brands should think about segmentation as a long term program, and focus on collecting data over time to make accurate, evidence-based decisions about who a customer is and what they need.
Take a holistic (but granular) approach to marketing campaign execution
When it comes to putting your data insights to practice, it’s important to choose your digital channels wisely. Marketing should really be an omnichannel strategy, pushing your campaign across every touchpoint, from in-store signage to app notifications.
Keep in mind that some campaigns should only target a certain portion of your customer base.
Remember the Pareto Principle – that 80 percent of your revenue comes from 20 percent of your customer base. Securing and leveraging those top 20 percent is absolutely critical to seeing significant long-term impacts on your sales and growth.
Be sure to set up the right rewards and messaging delivery points for each target audience too. Say you are implementing a marketing campaign to encourage more sales late at night – it would not make sense to target people that you know are young parents. Instead, you would push offers and reminders to customers you know have purchased late-night burgers in the past.
How To Use Personalization in Your QSRs Marketing Strategy
Your marketing strategy needs to incorporate personalization to achieve higher retention rates and sales.
Measure ROI and be able to predict future results
Throughout every campaign, it is essential for brands to actively track overall shifts. If you start to see adverse effects of a new strategy, you will know to change your approach before it causes any further damage.
Brands should consider measuring these key metrics:
- Repeat visit frequency
- Conversion rates
- Order value
- Revenue per customer visit
- Cart abandonment rate
- Lifetime customer value
Before, during, and after new marketing campaigns, QSRs should be looking at both the campaign goal but also at other key metrics to catch any unforeseen consequences of a new approach. For example, if your brand starts to offer free refills on soft drinks, that offer may lead to more repeat visits – but it may also reduce order value. Looking at the overall effect of your efforts, whether it is a social media marketing campaign, a product launch campaign, or a new push to generate organic traffic, brands should ensure that it is actively pushing your QSR forward for the long term.
Build a repeatable process
The inherent challenge of personalization at scale is being able to consistently offer individualized experiences while also growing your customer footprint. To truly achieve an effective approach across every marketing channel, QSRs need automated advertising and business tools. From accurate segmentation to AI-driven messaging, technology is the answer to reducing manual effort while increasing customer engagement.
The great news about having a repeatable process is that it will help your brand jump ahead exponentially. With every successful campaign, not only will you reap the benefits from that single program, but you will also gain the insight and the data to begin another, even stronger one.
Automation is helping brands curate better customer experiences, while also driving forward measurable, long-term business growth. Leverage data-driven technology to bring your QSR up to speed, and start seeing your marketing efforts launch your brand forward.
