The CDP in a restaurant elevates customer experiences, leading to increased sales & profits. The treasure trove of customer data helps you make more informed and automated business decisions. For example, a CDP can track customer preferences and purchasing habits to personalize marketing messages. Restaurants can serve their customers better and encourage them to visit more often and spend more per visit. Moreover, with a CDP, you can identify the most effective marketing channels to reach and engage customers. Consequently, restaurants can optimize their marketing spend and increase overall revenue.
What Is a Customer Data Platform?
A customer data platform (CDP) is a collection of all of your customers’ information gathered from a variety of sources, including POS, online ordering, waitlist and reservations, gift cards, loyalty, marketing tools, and customer feedback. A CDP helps you monetize this data and turn it into sales & profits. We will discuss all the benefits in detail. However, all of those benefits lead to a singular goal – increased sales & profit.
CDP can create a comprehensive, unified view of each customer, which can include information such as their:
- First and last name
- Date of birth
- Email address
- Cell phone numbers
- Favorite items
- Purchase history
- Customer satisfaction score
- ROI of the customer
It may even offer information about the customer’s social media profiles and followers. A CDP brings together all of this data in a single, unified view, allowing restaurants to gain a complete and accurate understanding of each customer. This is now imperative to the survival of any restaurant business.
Where Does the CDP Data Come From?
A customer data platform (CDP) collects information from a variety of sources to create a comprehensive, unified view of each customer. This information comes from every customer-facing application, which includes POS, online ordering, waitlist and reservations, gift cards, loyalty, marketing tools, and customer feedback to name the major apps.
- CDP collects the customer transactional data from the POS, which is inherently the most important tech inside of any restaurant because it holds the transactional shopping behavior of every customer. This is extremely important because it tells you what your customers spend on. Such data will include the items ordered, visit frequency, average spend, number of guests at every visit, times of day that they typically visit the restaurant, average tips, and even their preferred payment method.
- CDP also collects data from other apps such as online ordering, loyalty, and gift card systems, however, all of those are directly integrated into the POS system. These applications are transactional, meaning they involve the exchange of money.
- Additionally, a CDP collects information from non-transactional but vital applications that may not be integrated to the POS system. These would be your waitlist and reservation system, your customer feedback app or your website.
Overall, a CDP collects information from a variety of sources to create a comprehensive view of each customer. A non-actionable CDP is as useless as not having a CDP. After all, what good is the data if it cannot be turned into sales and profits, which leads us to the next topic.
Can CDP Save Restaurants Money?
No, CDP is not designed to save you money, it is there for one purpose, to increase sales & profits. It is not a money-saving tool, period.
A customer data platform (CDP) increases sales and profits in several ways. It helps the restaurant optimize its marketing impact. By tracking customer behavior and preferences, a CDP can provide exact insights into which marketing channels are most effective at reaching and engaging customers which in turn helps the restaurant focus its marketing efforts on the channels that drive revenue. This can help a restaurant save money on ineffective marketing tactics as a secondary benefit but its primary goal is again, to increase sales and profits.
An indirect way for a CDP to increase sales is to monitor the customer experience throughout their lifetime. For example, a powerful and actionable CDP monitors the customer satisfaction proactively and turns the net-promoters, those who love your brand, into more 5-star, positive reviews and brand ambassadors online but equally important, it will escalate those potentially negative experiences to the management team to turn these customers into loyal customers. This is where the true power of unified CDP shines.
Overall, while a CDP is not a cost-saving measure, it can provide valuable insights that can help a restaurant make more money through personalized marketing campaigns and as a secondary benefit saves them some money.
What Difference Can CDP Make in Marketing?
Targeted personalization differentiates personalized marketing from mass marketing. Mass marketing uses generic messages to reach a large, diverse audience. This approach is often used when a restaurant wants to address several potential customers with a broad, general message. It does have its use, and a great example is a grand opening announcement for a new nearby location or a national marketing campaign for a cause. Something unrelated and the same regardless of the target audience.
In contrast, personalized marketing is a marketing approach that tailors messages and offers to individual customers based on their specific preferences and behavior. Restaurants use this approach when they have detailed information about customers and want to create personalized experiences that are more likely to engage and convert, i.e., increase the frequency of visits or average spending.
Mass Marketing vs Personalized Marketing
One key difference between mass marketing and personalized marketing is the level of personalization. Mass marketing is generally not personalized at all, while personalized marketing is tailored to individual customers. This means that personalized marketing is typically more effective at engaging and converting customers, but it is also more time-consuming and resource-intensive than mass marketing because you must build the customer data platform first.
Another key difference between mass marketing and personalized marketing is the level of customization. Mass marketing generally uses generic messages that are the same for all customers, while personalized marketing allows for more customization and flexibility. This means that personalized marketing is typically six times more effective at reaching and engaging customers, but it also requires more detailed customer data and a higher level of expertise to execute effectively, and again, this is why an actional, transactional CDP is required.
How Do I Get Started with a CDP?
The most important part of any CDP platform is transactional data and therefore, the most important component is a Smart POS system.
A smart POS system is the core foundation for the successful implementation of a CDP. A Smart POS must be able to gather the relevant customer data and feed it into CDP for processing.
One of the key ways a smart POS system provides actionable data – tracking customer purchasing habits and preferences. This information can be used to provide insights into the most popular items, which customers are the most valuable, and other information that can help the restaurant make more informed business decisions.
Finally, a smart POS system integrates with other systems and platforms, such as online ordering, gift cards, and 3rd party delivery systems to provide actionable data. This can provide a more comprehensive view of each customer which again, leads to a more effective marketing campaign which then leads to increased sales and profits.
Overall, a smart POS system provides transactional data to a restaurant by tracking customer behavior, preferences, and engagement, and by integrating with other systems and platforms, it creates a holistic view of the most important data about the customer, the transactional data.
Moving on, the other key parts of a CDP are the implementation and integration of online ordering systems, waitlist and reservations, customer feedback, third party delivery systems, gift cards, and loyalty programs. Each of these apps is crucial because it provides some metrics about the customer’s purchase behavior, their preference, or their satisfaction.
What is an Actionable Transactional Customer Data Platform?
Data gathering must be intentional and essential to accomplishing a business goal like boosting sales/profit. So, a CDP that only provides data is useless because analyzing the data can get tedious and time-consuming.
Generic data by itself is the most useless type of data anyone can gather. Transactional data is better than general data but the holy grail is Actionable Transactional Data.
Transactional is clear, that is, the spending behavior of your customer. This is critical because it tells you what your customers are spending money on.
What About Actionable Data?
Actionable data is a lot more difficult. This is every data set combined to allow you to decide without having to sort it, analyze it, and try to figure it out. A great example is a kids eat free campaign that goes out on Tuesday of every month to DFW market locations, for those who have kids. This is a perfect example of actionable transactional data in use. All you have to do is create the campaign, select how often and what geographical area it must go out to, and the target audience. Everything else happens automatically.
Additionally, actionable transactional data can help a restaurant understand the times of day that customers are most likely to visit. This can help the restaurant optimize its staffing and operations. For example, if the data shows that customers are most likely to visit for lunch, the restaurant can ensure it has enough staff to provide good service and reduce wait times.
Finally, actionable transactional data helps your restaurant create more personalized experiences for your customers. By using actionable transactional data, your restaurant can send targeted offers to customers based on their individual preferences and behavior. This helps your restaurant build stronger relationships with your customers, encourage them to visit the restaurant more often, and increase your average check. Building customer loyalty starts with being able to provide exceptional customer experiences.
Milagro’s Actionable Transactional Customer Data Platform
Milagro has built the most advanced actionable customer data platform specifically for restaurants. Our comprehensive suite of Smart Solutions eliminates the need for integrations, managing over ten vendors and more importantly, having to always think of the next thing to stay ahead of the competition. We manage the entire solution for you by providing you with managed services in IT and marketing with robust solutions to achieve the only goal that matters, increasing sales and profits.
Our Systems automatically gathers the transactional data, sorts through it, takes actions and measures the return on investment so you can focus on growing your restaurant brand.
Contact us today to learn more.
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