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HISTORY:
Prior
to the tragedy on September 11, things were coasting along nicely
in 2001 on target for a 5%+ increase. From that point until the
end of the year, we gave back about 70% of our eight-month increase.
The year ended with a 1.4% sales increase, miniscule but better
than many people.
JANUARY
2002:
After
receiving and digesting much of the Restaurant Marketing System
materials last month, I decided to take the plunge into Direct Response
Marketing. I found a bucket of three year old Entry Blanks from
our 3rd Anniversary Contest in March 1999, culled out about 150
January birthdays, designed and sent a card offering a “FREE
One-pound Lobster Dinner” to those 150 people. We also began
handing out Guest Information Forms (GIF) to gather data from our
guests. By the end of the month we had redeemed 28 cards bringing
in 90 guests, created $ 2,335.25 in sales, gathered info totaling
1800 new people for our database and posted a sales decrease of
4.5%.
FEBRUARY
& MARCH 2002:
Things began to improve slowly and by the end of the 1st
Quarter we had worked our way back to a 4.4% sales increase with
the database surpassing 5,000 people’s birthdays and anniversaries.
APRIL
– JUNE 2002:
The 2nd Quarter really became the convincing time for me as we sent
out 600, 900 and 1,000 Birthday cards, redeemed nearly 1,000 (close
to 40%) and generate $48,000 in sales after discounts, a 24.4% increase.
We also added Anniversary Cards to our mailing beginning in June
with about 500 cards being mailed for the month, 182 redeemed and
over $7,500 in added sales. The guest-per- card number was lower
than birthdays. I guess people invite friends to help celebrate
birthdays but do the anniversary thing mainly as couples.
JULY-
SEPTEMBER 2002:
Data management became more complicated as we passed 12,000 entries.
Excel and Mail Merge were handling the work and spitting out labels.
The cards, now numbering about 300 a week had to be labeled, stamped
with the expiration date and a stamp - a lot of work, but worth
it. I had read about various software programs and ordered
a package from ProfitMAX in Orem, UT. It arrived in mid-July
as we were in the throes of Little League Championship baseball,
spending almost three weeks on the road. The ProfitMAX people enabled
me to play with the software while they converted our database from
Excel to their program.
The neat things about the software are: 1) printing the
address, birth date and expiration date all on the cards at once
(you can actually do the postage at the same time also, but I haven’t
gone that far), plus 2) the ability to log redemptions and track
customer usage. I felt this to be extremely helpful as we move forward
and want to do more sophisticated tracking and developing of specific
Guest Lists.
The 3rd Quarter boomed and mainly in my absence…which felt
good. A 56.8% sales increase moved us to 27.3% after three quarters.
I was ecstatic and slowly being convinced this Direct Response was
good stuff - controllable, measurable and profitable.
OCTOBER
– DECEMBER 2002:
The 4th Quarter caused some marketing creativity in the sense that
we did not want too many people redeeming cards in December,
typically our biggest sales month of the year. We stopped
mailing cards from December 8 – 26, but still ended the month
up 24.4%, a nice number but a big drop from October and November.
We ended the year up 31%.
Beginning
SALES COMPARISONS
MONTHLY
(2002 vs. 2001) QUARTERLY (2002 vs. 2001) Y-T-D
January
February
March |
-4.5%
14.5
3.0 |
First |
4.4% |
|
April
May
June |
24.7%
28.1
20.2 |
Second |
24.4% |
14.9% |
July
August
September |
70.6%
54.2
47.5 |
Third |
56.9% |
26.3% |
October
November
December |
59.3%
49.4
24.4 |
Fourth |
41.4% |
31.0% |
Year
2003 vs. 2002 |
|
|
January
February
March |
50.3%*
23.2*
13.0 |
First |
26.3% |
36.4%** |
*
Total of four days closed for snow and repairs ** 12-month
period |
The challenge
now becomes how to continue sizeable sales increases as we move
into the Second Quarter and begin to run up against the “strong
numbers” from 2002. Employment of “cold list”
mailings, which we tested in January with a “Brendan’s
13th Birthday” offer, returned good results (4.2% redemption
with 70% of the users being First Time people) not only as a good
ROI, but also as a way to drive new people into the restaurant.
I am planning a “Magnetic Mailing” offer (refrig magnet
with a Phone for Reservations number, plus a dozen “sand dollars”
toward dinner) to our neighboring zip code (about 6,000 addresses)
for late in April. Also, our first Quarterly Newsletter should be
ready by then with not only information, but also an incentive to
visit us soon.
Along with
these, an “Officer’s Club” opportunity mailed
to special guests (highly regulars) inviting them to bring friends
(people like them) for dinner and receive free entrees is being
developed. This will be a Special Invitation offer, eventually to
be widened to a promotion that you can register for on our web site.
It’s designed to bring in more parties of 4-6 people rather
than the 2.4 average. These kinds of “specific”
mailings are easy to develop and track through ProfitMAX’s
program.
I also am
looking into Loyalty Cards (or a Continuity-type variation –
The Marblehead Yacht Club), Gift Cards (rather than the paper certificates
we now use), a formal Takeout Program with a full-blown promotional
launch, and the start up of our annual “Tuesday is Lobster
Day” (which has been delayed because of lobster prices remaining
so high).
All, or
some, of this should lead to meeting my projections of 15-20% increases
this year.
The
Marblehead Grill and Chowder House has over 30,000 names in their
marketing database |
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