How Direct Mail Helped Buca di Beppo Sing Happy Birthday 20,000 Times

In a marketing atmosphere gone ad blind from nonstop digital ads, one innovative chain of restaurants broke through the noise with a Direct Mail marketing prospecting campaign. Their unique marketing campaign delivered a delicious offer that had recipients clamoring for seconds. And the results? Well, they speak for themselves: Their seats were selling like hotcakes while their competition was cooking for one.

With Postie, a well-known chain of family-friendly Italian restaurants was able to kick off a highly targeted restaurant Direct Mail campaign within 72 hours and set new industry standards for ROAS and conversion rates.

Background

Getting a potential customer to try out a new restaurant is no small order, particularly with the challenges brought on by the COVID pandemic. Our client, a restaurant chain with more than 76 company-owned locations across the United States, specializes in cooking up authentic Italian dishes suitable for the entire family. They’re all about creating a warm, lively culinary experience, and were struggling to get families to dine-in

The Challenge

This Italian restaurant chain, accustomed to filling their tables with loud, happy families, was facing an uphill battle. They had taken all the necessary safety precautions and were following local guidelines, still the number of families patronizing their restaurants was dwindling, and they were looking for a way to amplify their restaurant marketing.

They wanted to attract customers to their locations with an out-of-the-box marketing campaign that would definitely get noticed by the hard to reach, high-LTV audience they were aiming to attract. But that wasn’t all, they wanted a truly unique campaign that would stand out from the crowd of social media ads that everyone else in the restaurant industry was running, and include:

• The ability to manage each location’s campaign independently for geo- targeting and customization purposes.
• New customers that were willing to spend big and come back often, like their regular, pre-pandemic customer did.
• Compelling, highly personalized offers based on life events like birthdays and/or new home purchases.

The Postie Solution

Postie Prospecting Campaigns merge Direct Mail with innovative digital marketing strategy like lookalike models, custom audiences and response optimization to help organizations quickly and easily acquire new customers.

Postie delivered a compelling solution for the restaurant’s prospecting needs. The team decided to launch a Direct Mail campaign leveraging highly pinpointed, strategic audience building based on high LTV personas.

Step1: Building a new audience out of the restaurant’s 1st party CRM data.
The restaurant integrated its proprietary CRM data into Postie Data Management Platform (DMP) which identified and segmented a group of high-performing LTV diners. Their characteristics were then applied to a 3rd party data set and Postie’s Lookalike Audience Builder to create an extensive lookalike audience. That mailing list was then geographically segmented to a zip code radius around each one of the restaurant’s physical locations.

Step 2: Driving engagement with a compelling offer that combined personalization with special, life event offers.
Using Postie’s Data Layering technology, birthday data was overlaid on the lookalike audience to identify those prospects with birthdays during the month the campaign went live. Postie’s Unlimited Personalization enabled each direct mail piece to be personalized with the recipient’s name and a special birthday discount coupon.

With Postie Storefront Management, it’s possible to manage multiple storefronts from one account. Using this feature, our client was able to customize the campaign by adding independent campaign parameters such as unique geo characteristics to each restaurant location. Specifically, locations were assigned different budgets based on their size and potential campaign outcomes. For example, the Dallas location allocated a budget for 4,500 direct mail postcards while the Kansas City location sent out 550.

Step 3: Increasing agility with a super fast time-to-market.
When it comes to marketing, time is of the essence: the LTV-model and audience building effort took less than 2 hours with Postie DMP, while the entire direct mail campaign was deployed in just 72 hours from start to finish.

Results

The campaign was an astounding success. The response rate was tracked based on redemptions of unique coupon codes at point of sale, as the prospecting campaign focused on new clients that weren’t already in the restaurant’s customer loyalty program.