Paytronix Helps Shari’s Café & Pies Increase Customer Engagement with Younger Demographic

Carrie Henderson, marketing manager for Shari’s Cafe and Pies, realized that with so many of it nearly 100 24-hour-a-day locations in the Pacific Northwest located near college towns, the company wanted to cater more heavily to a younger demographic.

Creating more effective customer engagement for this demographic was a challenge. So, Shari’s Café and Pies turned to Paytronix Systems, Inc., a leading provider of reward program solutions to restaurants and retailers.

With a large assist from Paytronix Data Insights, Shari’s increased enrollment in its Café Club Rewards program by 30 percent of customers aged 45 and younger.

By effectively targeting and incentivizing these guests, Paytronix helped Shari’s increase visit frequency and spend among a much younger demographic.

Shari’s is the largest chain of family-style restaurants in the Pacific Northwest with nearly 100 locations open 24-hours a day, seven days a week. Shari’s Paytronix-powered Cafe Club Rewards program helps the chain better understand its guests and then create relevant promotions that drive guests to visit more frequently. By offering the easiest, most diverse methods for enrollment in-store, online, and via mobile apps, the Cafe Club Rewards program has been in growth mode since it was launched in August 2014.

“Paytronix has assisted us with providing data that allows us to use segmentation for rewards based on visit and spend frequency,” Henderson told Loyalty360. “We’re constantly monitoring the age mix in each grouping and then we develop different incentives to motivate each group that matches their likelihood of visiting. We’ve seen a lot of success using this segmentation model. It’s really about marketing to them in a way that’s relevant. We use purchase behavior, visit frequency, spend, and daypart to develop communications that resonate with our target audience.”

Henderson said the results show that Shari’s successfully motivated the behavior of guests within this segment through incremental visits.

“When we’re able to capture a younger segment and see positive results, it’s really rewarding,” Henderson added. “With the ability to segment, we’re able to create a program that truly caters to the needs of the guest instead of a one-size-fits-all model.”

Michelle Tempesta, director of marketing, Paytronix, told Loyalty360 that, at a high level, its clients try to maximize the positive financial impact their marketing programs contribute to their unique brands.

“Levers that contribute to that impact include compelling incremental visits and spending, keeping customers active over longer periods of time, and broadening their direct reach by attracting more members to their respective loyalty programs,” Tempesta said. “Goals are also frequently set at the store level. Paytronix Data Insights helps its clients right-size goals for each store using metrics such as AUV, check volume, and percent loyalty penetration. With data on hand, SMART goals can be set at the store level. “

As clients progress through their loyalty strategy journey from the implementation of a new program to the care and feeding of a mature program, the Paytronix Data Insights team compares their results to that of their peers.

“With benchmarks from more than 300 similar restaurant chains, each client can immediately answer board-level question starting with, ‘how are we doing?’’’

The Paytronix Data Insights technology launched in 2012.

“The first step was implementing an unstructured data system making accessing and adding data sets easier for the data science team without impeding the speed and quality of the transactional system,” Tempesta said. “The team has been on a transformative innovation path ever since. This year, the data science team created predictive scores that enable marketers to exclude or include customers who are unlikely, likely, or very likely to exhibit a certain behavior, such as visit in the next thirty days.”

For example, if a marketer wants to create a promotion with an offer that is designed to drive traffic within the next 30 days, they would not want to cannibalize sales with customers who would visit anyway.

“Today, Paytronix users would exclude customers who are likely or very likely to visit in the next thirty days from their campaign,” Tempesta added. “The innovations coming from the Data Insights team are boundless. With access to all check-level data, visit data, spend data, POS data, reservation system, survey data, email club data, and more, the data scientists ensure marketers’ targeted offers are maximizing incremental visits and profitability.” 

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