The three powerful ways you can harness customer data to supercharge your QSR business.
If you don’t know what your customers want, how can you provide it? The better you understand your customers, the more you can offer the things that will keep them coming through your door or paying you a digital visit.
Once you understand customer behaviours and preferences, you are unlocking a gold mine – a wealth of valuable information. When you truly understand why, how, where and what your customers want to buy, you can tailor your menu, your promotions and your loyalty program to increase engagement, brand loyalty and sales. All of which adds up to increased profit and winning in the highly competitive world of QSR.
That’s why, for forward-looking QSRs, customer data is one of their most valuable assets. It underpins the sound business decisions and marketing strategies that power business growth. For QSRs with an IT hospitality platform the data they need is already captured, in their point of sale, loyalty and web and app systems, and with smart analytics and reporting, they can have this information at their fingertips.
How can QSRs use customer data to boost their business?
There are three ways that QSRs can leverage customer data to generate increased sales and growth.
- Personalised marketing
Today’s consumers are very savvy, and ‘one size fits all’ marketing campaigns and generic ads simply don’t wash with them. The vegan doesn’t think much of a campaign for the latest meat feast pizza, and the single person isn’t likely to respond to offers for family sized meals. The campaigns that resonate and which get the greatest engagement are those that are tailored.
Tailoring could be at the individual level, with offers based on past purchasing behaviours. Or it can be targeted to a particular segment of the market, who all have similar characteristics. An example of this is a QSR that segments their customers by frequency of purchases and then has two campaigns: One for frequent visitors offering ‘thank you’ loyalty-based offers, and one for occasional visitors, giving them ‘we’d love to see more of you’ discounts as incentives for repeat business.
Tailoring can also be geographic – geolocation tells the QSR when the customer is near the store, so they can send them a timely offer to come in and eat.
2. Optimised menus
It makes sense that you’ll sell more of the menu items that customers love best. The right data will tell you which items popular, which ones are underperforming, and which combinations of items are frequently ordered together. You can then further break this down by location, time of day and even weather conditions. You’ll be able to spot trends, such as more customers choosing healthy options, or bigger/smaller sizes, or sustainably sourced products.
Al of this information enables you to update and adapt your menu to exactly what your customers want to eat and drink, to maximise sales and to avoid the waste and cost of having unsold items and ingredients.
When you introduce new menu items, data plays its part again – helping you to test the impact of your new dishes and drinks. QSRs could test different new options in different and use data analytics to get a clear picture of what’s going to work (or not), before doing a full scale rollout. This approach has a lower risk than going straight for a full-scale launch and ensures that when you do introduce new items on a bigger scale, you do so knowing they’re going to be snapped up.
Menu optimisation isn't just about adding or removing items; it's also about maximising sales through cross-selling and upselling. Data on what customers frequently purchase together can help QSRs create targeted combo deals or meal bundles.
- Enhanced Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs are the key to retaining customers in QSR and data analysis can make them even more effective. Data about a customer’s order history can be turned into a meaningful loyalty offer that gets far greater take-up. For example, instead of a loyalty discount, a customer who buys a coffee every morning could be offered a free beverage for every so many purchases.
Being able to identify your highest value customers opens up the opportunity to created tiered loyalty programs, making your most loyal customers feel extra special with exclusive offers and VIP discounts which create a stronger loyalty bond. Customers who are close to the next tier can be sent offers to get them over the line into the next tier. All of these initiatives can be measured with data analytics to ensure you’re getting the very best value from your loyalty program.
The bottom line
In our data-driven world, customer data offers QSRs an opportunity to deliver a real fillip to their business, by using it to tailor marketing, optimise menus and get even more from their loyalty programs.