How to Capture Your Restaurant Customers’ Information

Many restaurants capture their clients’ information in some way or another.

Some restaurants follow the low-tech route, and just ask their clients to fill in a simple form with their names, physical address, email, and (hopefully) their birthdays and anniversary on exchange for some kind of perk (coupons, discounts, etc.).

Other restaurants capture the information online; either with a form in their websites, or by using services such as OpenTable, email, etc.

The nice thing about online capturing is that when customers make a reservation, they enter the information themselves, so there are no errors to deal with.

Many restaurants do both: online and offline capturing.

However, the badly kept secret in this industry is that very few restaurants act upon all that information that they keep on accumulating.

Based on my own experience, many restaurants keep all that captured information in one or more separate silos, such as:

√ Paper cards
√ Emails (received or sent to customers)
√ Reservations book
√ OpenTable information locked within their database
√ Online information kept on their own website
√ Etc.

So what should a restaurateur do with all that data, and how can they make sense out of it?

The first thing that they should do is to consolidate all the data into just one database.

So how can you consolidate all the data that you have dispersed in many places? Just follow these three simple steps:

STEP 1: OPEN AN ACCOUNT IN AWEBER OR ICONTACT

If you haven’t done so, the first step for you is to open an account in one of the main email marketing and auto-responder companies such as AWeber or iContact . There are many more out there but these two have excellent customer reviews (I use AWeber myself to manage my own email marketing).

By opening an account with either one of these companies, you will be able to easily create, publish, and track email broadcasting, newsletters, surveys, blogs, autoresponders and RSS feeds. If you are not familiar with autoresponders or RSS feeds, you can click on the names to see the definitions.

The price for both companies depends on the size of your list, but it will run you between $30 and $50 a month. The lower fee will cover up to 2,500 customers and the higher up to 5,000, with unlimited emails to the list. Both services have similar pricing.

STEP 2: CREATE AN AWEBER (OR ICONTACT) FORM IN YOUR WEBSITE TO CAPTURE ALL NEW CUSTOMER’S INFORMATION

Once you’ve opened an account in AWeber or iContact (or some other auto-responder system from the many available), the next step is to create a subscription form in these programs and add the HTML code to your page so that all your future customers enter the information there.

This sounds more difficult than it is. Both programs will guide you step by step in the form creation process. If you are not managing your website, ask your webmaster to do it for you, or just do it yourself and give her/him the necessary JavaScript or HTML code that you’ll need to add to your website.

Make sure that you give your subscribers some kind of bribe (discount, printable coupon, etc.) so they are motivated to give you their information.

STEP 3: CONSOLIDATE ALL YOUR EXISTING DATA INTO YOUR NEW AWEBER FORM

OPENTABLE: If you have an OpenTable account, you can export your data into an Excel spreadsheet and then import it into AWeber or iContact.

In the reporting section of open tables programming, you can export any reports that you run. The reports range from all guests, to guests that have dined a certain number of times, etc.

There is a removable thumb drive on the underside of the OpenTable’s terminal. Save your report to the thumb-drive, remove it and plug it in to your computer. You should be able to copy the XLS file, open it in Excel in your computer, and save it as CSV so that it can be imported in AWeber or iContact.

By default, both AWeber and iContact will send an email to your list asking them to confirm their subscription to your list. Although this may look like a hassle, it actually works to your advantage, since only the interested customers will subscribe to your list. In this way, you avoid spam.

PAPER CARDS: The best solution is to have one person from your staff access your website, and enter your customer’s information by hand as they wrote it in their printed cards in your online subscription form. In this way, your customer’s information will become part of your online list. Since these customers gave you already permission to contact them, it is OK to enter their information online.

REGISTRATION BOOK: Follow the same process than the Paper Cards, except that in most cases you won’t have their emails (just names and phone numbers).

I would suggest you to have somebody from your staff (or yourself if you feel like it) call your guests and explain that you are creating an emailing list, and that you would like to have their email added to the list. Ask themselves to go to your website and subscribe to your list (or they can give you their email and you can subscribe them but this will create lots of errors with the emails). Tell them about the freebie that you are giving them for subscribing.

EMAILS: I’m sure that by now you have accumulated a number of emails that you have in your restaurant’s email account. Having your customer’s emails doesn’t give you permission to automatically subscribe them to your list, but you can email them and let them know that they can do it themselves (via your website) and, again, tell them about the advantages of subscribing.

YOUR OWN SITE: Many restaurant websites already have some kind of subscription form or online reservation system (other than OpenTable). If you have a way to capture your customer’s information in your site, please ask your webmaster (or company managing your site) to send you a list of the customers that subscribed to your site or booked a reservation. Again, Excel sheet or CSV format are the best to import the data into AWeber.

Consolidating your data into one database with mass emailing and auto-responder capabilities is the first step towards implementing a solid email marketing campaign. In my next blog, I will talk about how to use your client’s information to promote your restaurant and increase your sales.