How Ticketmaster personalizes your event-purchasing experience

Have you ever purchased a ticket for an event and though, “how many people do I know who are attending this event?”  Or better yet, have you ever wanted to automatically receive notifications when your favorite artists or bands are playing nearby?

This is exactly what’s possible with the new Ticketmaster Facebook App.

Continue reading How Ticketmaster personalizes your event-purchasing experience

Digital Signage and the Customer Experience

Digital Signage and the Customer Experience

The Renovating and Revamping Trend

As old concepts are refreshed in the franchise world, more aspects of the business are moving digital from signage to punch cards. Brands have new and exciting options to explore when updating, renovating, and refreshing their stores. This trend has picked up recently with various franchise categories from regional chains such as the overhaul of Daphne’s California Greek (formerly Daphne’s Greek Café) to national chains such as Jack in The Box who is currently in the process of updating their logo, store décor, and overall image. Digital is seen as the future and forward-thinking concepts are looking to lead the way and reap the benefits of leveraging new technology. Digital signage, referring to menu boards, in-store kiosks, and point of purchase advertisement displays, are just a few examples of consumer-facing technology being deployed to drive sales and improve the in-store customer experience.

Staying Competitive in the Face of Change

Despite proof of measurable increases in revenue when properly leveraging new technologies, many franchisors and particularly their franchisees are off-put by anything different and resistant to change. The majority believe what has worked in the past, still works, and will continue to work. Even before understanding why trends are developing toward a more digital world, many are discounting new technologies, raising unfounded barriers, and ultimately doing themselves a disservice by not considering new technology a way to stay competitive and ahead of the curve. Continue reading Digital Signage and the Customer Experience

Brilliant Earth Day Video: Heal Our World, Heal Ourselves

Earth Day, Dance, and Media

My friends at Pacha’s Pajamas created an awesome video for Earth Day, with the focused message of balancing the negative and dirty media with positive and inspirational media for our children and future generations.

The end product is a dance video called Nature Superhero. The song itself is quite inspiration, as one of the rappers is Lil JaXi, a kid who has a severe case of stuttering and was bullied in school, until he discovered that his stuttering goes away when he starts to rap.

I wish more companies would do things to inspire the world through fun, dance, and positive messages.

If you believe in the cause of reinforcing media with positive messages, it would be powerful to share the video with your friends and embed it on your own sites.

RewardMe Infographic Friday: What Happens To Loyalty Program Points?

When it comes to the loyalty program points that consumers earn, spending them seems just as hard earning them. From the air miles to cash back points earned via credit cards, consumers earn, but don’t always spend the points.

The reason for this can be reasoned with the following:

(A) They forget: Perhaps the biggest reason why points go unused is that they are forgotten. For example, I earn points at the grocery store every time I purchase something, but rarely get any acknowledgement/updates of it. The instant benefit of getting a discount on the products I buy because of being part of the loyalty program makes me forget that the points accumulated can be used for something bigger and better.

(B) The rewards are unattainable/difficult to use: If you’ve ever tried to use your air mileage points for a trip, you know how hard it is to redeemed for the trip you actually want. Because of the difficulty and sometimes ‘impossible’ redemption milestones, consumers often see their efforts as fruitless.

Tip: When creating milestones for points, consider tiered levels of rewards: Easy, Medium, Hard. Your loyalty program should make it easy for the casual shopper to participate while making it worth while for the ‘hardcore’ shopper Continue reading RewardMe Infographic Friday: What Happens To Loyalty Program Points?

RewardMe Infographic Friday: How Hot Is Fast Casual Dining?

Since the economy took a turn for the worse in 2007, fast casual dining has been the fastest growing segment of the restaurant industry. From Chipotle to El Pollo Loco, fast casual is impacting the direction that restaurant industry through it’s growing consumer demand.

So what exactly is ‘fast casual?’ According to an article by QSR Magazine, fast casual is defined as the following:

“fast-casual concepts are hybrids of quick-service and casual dining that provide counter service and offer more customized and freshly prepared dishes than traditional quick-serves, all in a upscaled, inviting atmosphere. It’s conceded that fast-casual concepts should not feature a drive-thru window or true table service. An entertainment factor often figures in, even if it’s simply the customer’s proximity to and interaction with the staff as his food is prepared—for instance, the choice of side dishes at Panera or the interaction with the person building your burrito at Chipotle.”

To give you an idea of how ‘hot’ fast casual dining is doing, check out this great infographic which also points out the top fast casual dining restaurants:

Infographic credit to Fast Casual.

Big Data: How Target Knows You Are Pregnant

Consider the following scenario: in the past month Susan, a 20-something female shopper, purchased a large container of unscented lotion, an assortment of supplements such as zinc and calcium and a large purse from Target. As a result, Target can make the educated assumption that she is pregnant with an expected delivery date 5 months from today. Sound unbelievable? In reality, it’s not. Our hypothetical situation is exactly what’s happening.

As first written by the New York Times, retail giant, Target, has figured out how to successfully use shopper data to determine if an individual is having a baby and when. For Target, the importance of knowing this is that “the retailer has a chance to rope customers in around the birth of a child, when parents are so overwhelmed they are open to a one-stop shop.”

How Does Target Know?

Knowing someone is pregnant lies in the data gathering process. To start, Target assigns each customer a Guest ID Number. This ID Number, is then attached to their known credit cards, full name, and email address. By doing this, Target is then able to store and build out a historical timeline of purchases by customers.

By analyzing and reviewing the historical buying data of shoppers who were part of the Target Baby Registry, Target was then able to discover patterns in shopper behavior. For example, some of the discoveries included the following:

[One analyst noted] Women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.

Similar to how economists study recession curves and historic patterns to predict possible economic climates in advance, Target uses data as a way to predict consumer behaviors so that they can market products most relevant to an individual shopper. As a result of Target cornering the expected mothers market, the NY Times suggests that “Target’s gangbusters revenue growth — $44 billion in 2002 to $67 billion in 2010” can be attributed to their better understanding of consumers.

For the restaurant and quick-service industry, Target’s application of data to predict purchase behavior so that they could target shoppers at the ‘perfect’ moment is an excellent reason as to why the industry should begin focusing on ways to capture data and execute upon it.

3 steps on how to use customer data for Restaurants and the Quick-service industry

Step 1: Collect Data

Just how you can’t start building a house without the proper materials, businesses need to first capture customer data. In order to data-mine, it’s important to understand the opportunity points at which you can gather data.

Points at which customer data can be captured include the following:

1. During Purchase: in most cases these means the point-of-sale. Via the POS, businesses will be able to gather line by line purchases as well as total order value. If you are on an older POS system and are unable to capture this data, consider using add-on technology products.

2. Post-purchase: thanks to technology, businesses can easily gather post-visit data on users. Some of these methods include receipt surveys (asking a user to go to a website with an access code to review their visit), satisfaction email marketing, and business reviews (example: Yelp.)

What’s important to note in the above is that a user must have an identity in order for a business to link behaviors to it. For example, Target was able to create user ID’s based on identities verified through avenues such as email opt-ins. For restaurants and QSR’s, this can prove to be more difficult as traditional methods of ‘identifying users” such as the fore mentioned email opt-ins have been proven ineffective as they don’t attract a large enough customer base.

Step 2: Analyze the Data

Depending on the size of the restaurant (mom and pops vs. multi-franchise corporation), the route in which the data gathered is analyzed can be different. Regardless, there are still basic principles that should go into data analysis:

1. Trends: Target was successful because they studied historical data and found trends. For a restaurant and QSR, this means looking at historical date (1 year or further) and looking for trends such as what items are often bought together or never, which items sell the best during particular seasons, what day of the week do certain products sell the best, etc. The key here is to look at the data from a micro-level.

If an item sells well during a certain day of the week, what’s the reason? Do your competitors not have promotions that day? Is it related to the ‘quality’ of it that day (ie: fresh fish)? These are the sorts of questions that should be asked.

2. Process: The process by which you dig into data to ‘slice and dice’ is just as important as the data itself. Without a game plan, the results that come out of data analysis can be inaccurate and may be biased. For example, if you only look at a certain group with no ‘control’ group to match up against, your results will be skewed in on direction since their is no comparison.

Consider working with a data analyst or a service that provides business intelligence. While not traditionally a part of the restaurant and QSR industry, every industry is now in need of a better understanding of data. As we’ve seen from examples like Target, data is no longer a ‘luxury,’ but may provide to be a growing necessity for long-term business success.

Step 3: Act on Data

Now that you’ve gathered the data, the last step is how to turn what you know about customers and their purchasing behaviors into action.

As a business, the core premise will likely be to increase overall revenue, but acting on the data should be focused on areas identified as having the most immediate impact on the overall goal (revenue).

In Target’s case, this meant focusing on pregnant mothers who had the tendency to do their all their shopping at the same place (higher average spending.) For a restaurant, the equivalent of pregnant mothers may be families: How do you increase the average order value of family?

Another important note in regards to data is the timeliness in which it’s acted upon. The key with data is that the more ‘recent’ it is, the more valuable it is. As a comparison, consider shopper data like sales leads. New leads = a higher likelihood of becoming a conversion because they have expressed ‘recent’ interest. If the lead is passed over for 30 days, lots of things can change: the person no longer needs your product, they went with another vendor, or they have lost interest completely. Remember that the data process from capture to action should never stay stagnant.

Lastly, remember that if done correctly, the data will tell you what you want to know. We re-visit one last time Target and what happened when a father was upset that Target had sent his daughter coupons for baby related items:

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

Big Data. How are you using it?

RewardMe Infographic Friday: How To Take Advantage of Receipt Surveys

Prior to mobile surveys and some of the innovative ways of capturing customer data, restaurants and businesses used customer receipts as a way to gather customer data. While some customers may never stop to even look at their receipts, for those that do, they may find themselves with a free Whopper from Burger King or even a discount code for Old Navy.

Using receipt surveys, businesses are able to capture information on users that have completed a transaction. Unlike surveys that might poll consumers and customers who may never have purchased anything, receipt surveys guarantee that the customer has spent money with them. For a business, the data and feedback that the user leaves behind is equal if not more valuable than the ‘perks’ and free products that they give away.

Check out this handy infographic on how to take advantage of receipt surveys as well as what some big brands incentivize their customer with:

Infographic credit to lemon