Swapping prizes for your information…

Friday, July 12, 2024

Information is money. But how are you going to get your customers to offer up theirs?  The more that you know about your customers the better you can create additional revenue. Who are they? Where are they from? What is their Birthday or Anniversary? What did they think of their visit to your restaurant? All of this information is extremely valuable and so you need a way to secure that from your customers in a way that they want to give it to you. We devised a card that allowed for all of that, and gave them a chance at a reward at the same time.

             We created a card that fit inside a standard check presenter. On the front, we offered to enter them in a drawing for a chance to win $100 in dining certificates from the restaurant. They needed to fill out their name, email, address and optional Birthday and Anniversary information. In addition, we asked them how we did and did we exceed expectations. If we got a negative comment, the managers would respond to the email and send a note of apology. We gathered them and at the end of the month, we pulled a name and contacted them and sent them a $100.00 dining certificate. But, for everyone who filled it out, we added them to our email list.

We now had them on an email list and we could use the Birthday and Anniversary information as we pleased. We could look at where our guests were coming from and were able to focus our marketing on areas where we were getting the most traffic. Sometimes we would respond simply with a great big thank you for a glowing report. Or if they raved about a server or a bartender, we sometimes offered a prize for the staff member who had gone “Above and Beyond!”. We encouraged the servers to remind the guests to enter the contest and get on our email list so they could be informed of “All of the exciting things that we have coming up!” And when someone won, and brought in their $100 dining certificate to celebrate, we’d take a picture of them and let our email list know that so and so, were our prize winners for October!

             We made our contest cards colorful and attractive. Sometimes we would take them to charity functions and offer attendees a chance to sign up for the drawing. We would add 50 new names at an event of people who hadn’t necessarily been to the restaurant, but were now on our email list. At one restaurant we have over 13,000 names on the email list. Obviously, over 20 years, many of those folks are no longer active customers. But because we continue to add to those numbers, we have thousands of people view our Social media posts, every time we send something out. And all because we offered people a chance to win $100. (Which cost us a third of that in actual cost)

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