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How
do you compete when 22 restaurants and a theater with stadium seating moves into your neighborhood? Read how this restaurateur fought for his survival |
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“When your restaurant seats 300 in a town of 2,000 you know you’ve got your work cut out for you!” says Salem Suber, owner and general manager of Jasper Steak House in Jasper, GA. Now Jasper, Georgia, isn’t exactly on the beaten path. It’s located about an hour north of Atlanta, at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. This rural restaurant serves delicious country style meals and until a few years ago business was darn good. But when a WalMart, a super theater complex complete with stadium seating and 22 corporate restaurants moved within 14 miles, business took a sudden dive. “In this part of the country 14 miles is the distance to your mailbox. How could I compete with dinner and a movie? I soon experienced a loss of 25 percent of my business. It was devastating. Instead of giving up, I decided to fight back and that’s when I discovered how a little guy like me could compete against the big guys. That is through a simple concept called neighborhood marketing,” adds Suber. Neighborhood marketing saved Suber’s restaurant and today sales have never been better. Suber continues, “I started by building a database of names of my existing customers and did every thing I could think of to add the names and contact information for new customers. Through the database we developed birthday clubs, anniversary clubs, our very own Jasper Steak House Country Club, all offering incentives for people to come and see us. The only problem was that it was killing me off. Managing the database was exhaustive. I knew that I had to find a way to automate the process, I just couldn’t keep up at that pace. Through a stroke of luck Suber ran into ProfitMAX, a company that has developed a marketing software package designed specifically for restaurateurs. At first he hesitated to spend the money on the system, but as soon as it was up and running he knew that it was the answer to his problems. “I soon quit all mainstream image advertising. Instead I put all our efforts into ads that revolved around a specific offer, with a specific deadline. To get the offer the potential customer was instructed to go to our website and input their name, address and email information. Without having to input any data from the restaurant, ProfitMAX was able to use that information to create any number of promotional pieces including letters, newsletters, postcards and e-mail notices. The system coded each promotion. “Processing the marketing campaigns is very fast. ProfitMAX does all the work. (ProfitMAX has a publishing component build right in the system which helps you to create high-quality promotional pieces.) You don’t have to fuss with labels or stamps because ProfitMAX does all of that in the printing. You only have to send it through the printer once and it personalizes the message for each guest. ProfitMAX saves a lot of time. (So when a postcard was brought back in for redemption, we could easily input the code (in seconds) and at the end of the day see a recap of the daily return on investment for that specific campaign. ProfitMAX collates all the data so that I can see exactly what I spent and what I earned to date for that campaign,” continues Suber. Before ProfitMAX, when potential customers visited the Jasper website and signed up, someone had to transcribe that information into a database. “The secret to survival in this industry is direct response marketing and the secret to that is the efficient management of the database. You can even do Guest Satisfaction Surveys and Mystery Shopper Evaluations right within the software. I looked at lots of other systems but no one has a turnkey solution as complete as ProfitMAX. I, now, do more marketing in less time and show better redemptions using the ProfitMAX software. ProfitMAX is non proprietary,
which means that you can use it with other web-based software. This
makes it extremely versatile. “I would hate to think what
would have become of my business had I not found ProfitMAX when
I did, it truly saved my business!” ends Suber. |
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