Casual Dining Group

Challenge

Casual Dining Group (CDG) has no trouble acquiring new customers, as their brands are some of the most popular in the UK. However, two of the biggest challenges in the casual dining sector are how to increase retention and loyalty when there is high competition, and how to truly understand customers’ tastes, preferences and behaviour.

CDG brand, Bella Italia, wanted to find an innovative and entertaining way to increase data acquisition and find out exactly who their customers are. They needed something that would work in-restaurant that would encourage their customers to provide self-reported data using rewards as an incentive.

Collecting enough self-reported data would allow CDG to understand their customers’ preferences, improve data enrichment and segmentation, and retarget customers with personalised marketing messages.

Solution

Bella Italia needed to improve the quality of its data collection and increase data acquisition rates in its restaurants. To do this 3radical and CDG used Voco to create a retention ‘Scratch and Win’ game on the Bella Italia website, which was only advertised in restaurants, so they could measure onsite data acquisition and improve data enrichment.

Customers were offered daily plays of the scratch card game for the chance to win prizes which could be redeemed in restaurant. By limiting the amount of ‘tries’ per day customers were motivated by rewards to increase their engagement with Bella Italia, and provide self-reported data using the Voco survey mechanic on a daily basis. Importantly, this data was collected progressively. Each time someone offered up an additional item of data Voco allowed them to unlock an additional scratch, which encouraged prolonged engagement and higher data collection rates.

In addition to providing self reported data, Bella Italia could see, in-real time, which prizes were their customers preferred, how they were interacting with the brand and game, and how they liked to engage, which allowed Bella Italia to optimise and customise marketing activity.

Results

Bella Italia saw great results, especially considering how difficult it is to obtain self-reported data in the casual dining industry.

Thousands of Bella Italia customers played the ‘Scratch and Win’ game, which helped collect over 6,000 additional pieces of
self-reported data on their customers. The additional data collected included:
First Name
Date of Birth
Family
Food Preferences
Their favourite restaurant location

The first party data collected will allows Bella Italia to better understand its customers, personalise its marketing messages with specific and targeted offers, customise its offerings to better suit its customer base and, ultimately, build stronger customer relationships.

Interestingly, as the scratch card is an innovative and entertaining way to engage with customers Bella Italia saw an increase in users subscribed to its database, which is impressive considering how difficult it is to gather data with GDPR legislation in force.

Additionally, customers were given a choice of prizes which allowed Bella Italia to capture further customer insight data and resulted in a better understanding that specific customers’ preferences. Over 9,500 prizes were awarded, and as these prizes could only be redeemed in store, this also encouraged repeat visits and an increase in customer retention.

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