Franchise Update Magazine Issue III, 2015 | Page 48

CONSUMER MARKETING

CMOroundtable
“WHAT ANALYTICS ARE YOU USING
TO IMPROVE YOUR MARKETING?”
Jen Gulvik
SVP Marketing, Creative Director
Houlihan’s Restaurants
Our marketing has become heavily datadriven this past year upon development
of several new business intelligence (BI)
systems we’re leveraging. We have a CRM
platform that integrates transaction data
from our POS system with tokenized credit
card data and our large email customer database. Combining those three data sources,
we can communicate differently to recent
versus lapsed customers or based on what
they typically spend or buy. We can also
analyze our menu mix by once-per-year
customers versus five visits-per-year customers to understand if certain menu items
seem to be driving loyalty, for example.
We know the visit cadence
of guests, so now we analyze
both the immediate impact
of promotions and again, six
months later to see guests’
visit patterns before and after
coming in with a promotional offer. Did we cannibalize
an expected full-priced visit
with the offer? Improve their
visit cadence after that offer?
Marketing analyses take lifetime value into
account. It’s a truer ROI.
At the same time, many social media
channels have recently launched ad platforms that leverage consumer data, and
we’re early adopters. Today we can serve
an ad for Houlihan’s new gluten-sensitive
menu to someone searching Pinterest for
such recipes in the market. We can serve an
ad promoting rehearsal dinners at Devon
Seafood Grill to area wedding planners on
LinkedIn. Or advertise to someone currently on their phone within our trade
area searching for happy hour, who has
previously visited a competitor location.
By st