From Mass Marketing to One-on-One: 5 Ways to Personalize Guest Interactions

The leading brands constantly bombard customers with messages and invitations to interact with them. These are potential grouse points for customers who do not wish to be considered part of the herd. Nowadays, you will find the market saturated with different brands, all pushing towards the same goal of increased customer interaction, and this is visible across all mediums.

With so much noise, developing ways to stand out from the competition and develop a distinct voice and tone can become challenging. The key here is personalization, but it is difficult to achieve at scale for a brand whose customer base runs into the hundreds of thousands. 

In this article, we discuss 5 ways in which brand interaction can be personalized for the customer, across different mediums and how you can make these tactics see the light of day. With hyper-personalization, there is an increased chance of customer satisfaction, and let us see how to achieve that.

1. Ditch Static Menus and Embrace Dynamic Ones

Many new advances are being made in AI, with one of the most happening places where these developments take place in restaurants. With the advent of AI, one-size-fits-all menus are being shown the door in favor of dynamic menus, with influential brands taking the lead in adopting them for increased footfall. Dynamic menus, powered by OrderEm, enable leading restaurant brands to make automatic changes to their menus that are based on different external factors, like the weather outside. This allows them to deliver personalized communication to guests through custom restaurant menus. 

Going for a weather-based personalized menu provides a unique buying experience for the guest, being centric to the particular environment that the guest lives in. For example, if it is very hot and sunny outside, you can offer salads and soothing, cool mocktails to the guest, besides offering heavy discounts on those items. This will make the customers feel great and increase the headcount at your restaurant. 

2. List Segmentation- the New Way of Personalized Communication

Personalized emails are a surefire best practice when it comes to the question of email marketing. It happens to be a scalable way to deliver communication to guests, which is based on their individual preferences and buying behaviors. Segmented email audiences will ensure you provide relevant and valuable content to your guests and diminish the risk of unwarranted communication being blasted to them over the airwaves. 

You have to understand that not all of your customers are the same. Some will prefer tea over coffee, vegan dishes over meat, and pasta over pizza. If you use your restaurant data wisely, aided by OrderEm, you can make divisions in your customer base based on their preferences. If you do this, when a seasonal special or a new dish is launched, you will know which guests to target the most and which to leave alone. 

Segmenting your customers based on characteristics and attributes like loyalty tier, favorite menu category, and zip code is possible. You can even use promotion codes in a marketing campaign. 

When you have VIP customers who have stayed loyal to your brand over the years, you can invest in them with menu exclusives and limited-time offers. They are the ones who are most likely to respond to these calls. 

3. Use Merge Tags to Increase Customer Satisfaction and Email Engagement

Segmentation is the first step in personalization. You can personalize email content as well as subject lines in personalized emails. To do this, you can use merge tags, one of the easiest ways to personalize emails at a very low cost to the email marketer. A merge tag is related to an attribute or a data point associated with your guests. Examples are “first name,” “total loyalty points earned,” “favorite item,” and so on. You can use these data points to personalize your emails to the customer. 

If you can address the customer by his/her first name and give them unique offers, you will quickly score brownie points with your customer. As little as a personalized subject line can bring great results. Segmenting emails based on customer behavior and increasing personalization with merge tags will make the emails feel more tailored, specific, and interesting to your guest. You will also see improvements in click-through rates, open rates, and overall conversions. 

4. Drive Conversion Growth With Personalized Landing Pages

A personalized landing page can do a lot for you. Market surveys have shown that personalized calls to action have a conversion rate of 202% higher than generic landing pages. Also, dynamic landing pages that change based on the audience viewing them have a 25% higher mobile conversion rate.

With personalization powered by OrderEm, you can display the guest’s first name, city, local weather, and the company they work at (which does wonders if you have a catering company) and localize a paper headline. You can localize and tailor your messaging based on zip codes if you have a restaurant with a presence in multiple markets. However, if you do not have the manpower or tools to do this, it can become challenging for you. That is where OrderEm can step in and take the hard work off you. 

With the proper tools, it can be possible to craft amazing, delicious, and tempting landing pages that will invoke customer attention and interaction in a big way. Use the power of personalized landing pages to create an impression on the customer’s mind so that you can increase footfall to your fancy restaurant in a few short days. 

5. Use Online and App Ordering to Create a Hyper-Personalized Experience

Where will you go with a 3rd party ordering service or a badly designed native app ordering and web ordering system? Not far. You have little say in enhancing the guest experience if you have no personalization. With OrderEm’s web, loyalty products, and app, you, as a restaurant owner, can easily provide a great, personalized dining experience across all platforms, thereby creating a seamless extension of the in-store experience that a customer would otherwise have had, had he ordered physically while in the restaurant. 

You must have a personalized online and app ordering system armed with the proper experience. For example, in your app, you can greet the customer by his first name and immediately establish a rapport with him. 

You must admit that it is special to walk into a local cafe or restaurant and be greeted by your first name or have the staff know your usual order. It will reinforce a sense of community, which is essential for brand loyalty. In online ordering, a restaurant can be provided with a ticket bearing the customer’s name on a ticket, allowing the staff to greet the customer by name or allowing them to write the customer’s name on the takeaway bag. Small touches like these go a long way toward instilling brand loyalty. 

Conclusion

At a time when brands are constantly competing against one another for customer attention and loyalty, personalization is the holy grail and the only way in which a brand can distinguish itself from others. But remember that achieving personalization at scale requires expert help. Otherwise, it can become a real challenge. 

This article has outlined five strategies a restaurant can use to stand out in a crowded market. These are dynamic menus, guest segmentation, the use of merge tags, personalized landing pages, ordering online and through mobile apps, and finally, providing guests with tailor-made recommendations. 

If you wish to achieve personalization at scale, book an appointment with OrderEm. They have innovative technology at their disposal that can assist you with increasing your restaurant’s turnover, with automated menus, menu personalization, and a personalized buying experience for your guests.