How food service businesses can harness the power of personalisation

There’s a ping in your inbox with a lovely message from the restaurant you dined at last night; ‘We hope you enjoyed celebrating with us, we enjoyed having you. Please join us again’. Included is a link to the booking page. It’s an automated email. You know this, but it has your name on it and it’s a call to action right off the back of a wonderful experience. You click the link, make another booking and your data goes whizzing off to a venue that now recognises you as a repeat customer with a preference for window seating and a reasonably priced verdelho. It’s the wonder of direct digital marketing and the data gathering tools that can make hospitality experiences more personal. According to Marketing Tech News, a global survey of 5,000 consumers showed that 65% feel that personalisation drives their loyalty to a brand and that “consumers also expect brands to use their data to offer more relevant customer services.” 

But the right digital marketing strategy for your hospitality business isn’t as simple as Google Ads or texting generic information about Tuesday’s happy hour. In fact, according to Forbes (citing Smart Insights), 63% of consumers “will stop buying from brands that use poor personalisation tactics”.  

Identify your audience and data collection points 

According to Sam McKnaulty, founder, director and digital strategist at Merge Marketing, it is crucial to both identify your data collection points and to know your audience. Both are key to a personalised digital marketing strategy. While he acknowledges that food service businesses are wildly varied, audience analysis is a great starting point. 

“Understanding who your audience is – who is actually coming in the door and why – is a big thing,” he tells InSeason. “Once you understand that, then anything you put up on social media, or any digital channel, is more relevant. It also means menus or ticketed events can be customised based around who your audience is.”  

Data collection points are also widely varied and depend on what kind of technology each business engages with, but for hospitality, it includes booking and billing platforms, table ordering, ticket sales and event registrations.  

“These need to be fed into a single database,” says McKnaulty. “They can then be tagged based on what that product is. It might be a weekly special, a ticketed event or an interest in pale ale that means you can target them for beer-related events.” 

Understand what your systems can do 

Jeanine Bribosia, founder and director of The Cru Agency says that the booking platforms themselves are becoming detailed data collection points.  

“We’ve seen Seven Rooms start to dominate because it’s just so much better at that personalisation,” she says. “A lot of the information gathered in these systems is around dining preferences. Certainly, from a VIP standpoint, logging this information is crucial,” she says. “Venues can expect that kind of functionality from the booking platform they choose. It’s built-in now.” So, getting to know what your system can do is integral. 

Systems like Resy, The Fork and Seven Rooms all gather data that can be harvested, both to make the dining experience more personal in-house and to tailor digital marketing.  

Once, this sort of data-gathering was the province of the larger and fine-dining groups to create hyper-personalised ‘dream-weaving’ experiences (think New York’s Eleven Madison Park). Now, smaller venues have access to “software that allows them to log and track the habits of their customers,” advises Bribosia. 

Once you know the capabilities of your data collection points, this data can be used to personalise digital marketing and to track the conversion into bookings and sales.  

“Everyone starts with a pain point,” says McKnaulty. “It might be ‘we need to fill a gap in our functions calendar’, or ‘we need more corporates midweek’, so understanding your pain points – and then who is the best customer to fill that gap – will help you work out how to get in front of them and what channel that needs.”  

Segmenting your data for personalised marketing and customer experience  

McKnaulty suggests working with an agency to create a solution that works both with the data collection points you already have and reaches beyond that to work with other digital channels. But a great starting point is a healthy email database.  

“Building your email audience and then segmenting that based on interests is important,” he says. “Clicking on an email is free, whereas clicking on an ad costs money.”  

Alex Cameron, group GM of Venew group with venues Franca Brasserie, Parlar and Armorica, worked with an agency to launch the group’s website in January 2023 as the group expanded. The site ties all three venues together and is integrated with their booking system. The cross-pollination of data means that all three of their venues are easily accessed from one place. But, crucially, it also means that when a customer books online the system automatically offers availability at the other venues if their first preference is unavailable.   

“You have more chance of keeping someone in the group and maybe they will try another venue because it was offered to them,” he says.  

Implementing a website that brought their venues together also allowed for the consolidation of data collection. 

“We can do all our email marketing within the platform, and that has lots of tracking and reporting available. The guest information that we receive on bookings is stored there too.”  

Ultimately the tagging and segmenting of your data means that the team can personalise who they reach out to. That marketing can then be tracked for its conversion and it’s this kind of data that gives you the power to continue to tailor the customer experience.