To give you an overview we are a very busy restaurant in central London with a lot of destination diners.
Our primary objective is to increase our average spend per head by targeting guests with very precise incentives.
Traditionally the only effective ways to market to a restaurant customer were to either encourage them to book promotions through an online booking widget, or email them with information about offers.
We had done all this before but the task of creating promotions can be onerous in that it takes a huge amount of time to set promotions up with your reservation platform, and even then you can’t have too many promotions because it becomes overwhelming.
Emailing our database was also something we did regularly but it wasn’t generally very effective, even if guests read the emails they appeared to forget whatever the offer was when they came to dine with us. Also it was cumbersome to include more than two offers at a maximum and so the scope and variety of what we could try was much restricted.
Flycket has just been amazing and solves all of the issues we had.
Essentially as the restaurant owner I am able to quickly create a marketing flyer, called a Flycket, in an App on my phone. All I need is a hero image and then I just create my own offers and type them in.
This allows me to come up with lots of different ideas. Examples of what we actually did include, “Free glass of champagne with every coffee ordered”, “Half price digestifs with your desert”, “Happy hour cocktails on the bar from 3pm to 6pm” and so forth.
Because it takes minutes to create each one, and there was no prescriptive format that I had to follow, it was fun and easy to set them up as opposed to laborious and dull.
Once I had the Flyckets ready I started to share them immediately, first of all I sent them to my family and friends by WhatsApp and by letting them scan the QR code from the Flycket on my phone. I got feedback on whether they were cool or not (resoundingly cool) so then I shared them with our database in a variety of ways.
Our weekly mail-shot was scheduled for Friday so I included a couple of Flyckets in our mail-chimp email. I also set up the confirmation email from our booking platform to include a Flycket so that as soon as any guest booked with us they were offered a Flycket moments later in an email. Finally I posted them on social media direct from the Flycket App on my phone.
Probably the most amazing feature of Flycket was that as soon as I had shared the first Flyckets my phone started to ping as notifications came in thick and fast. Flycket tells the author of a Flycket every time someone ‘takes’ the Flycket into their Flycket wallet. It’s kind of like an ‘open report’ on an email but it’s live and it records every time a potential customer swipes right on a Flycket and stores it in the wallet in the customer version of the App.
That alone gave me a huge amount of feedback. I knew which Flyckets people liked enough to bother to save, information I would never have had if guests had just opened and read an email.
The next amazing thing was that some of my customers who had taken Flyckets started sharing them with their friends who weren’t on my database. I also got a ping every time a Flycket was shared from one friend to another.
All this started happening in the first few minutes after my weekly mail-shot went out and we had posted on social media.
As soon as we hit lunch service that day the first customer got their phone out, opened the App and asked for a bottle of champagne for £35 (which has proved to be one of our most popular deals).
We had spent 5 mins training the staff so they knew what to expect, they read the Flycket, got the champagne, took the customer’s phone and punched the Flycket in the App with our venue’s 4 digit PIN code.
I got my first ping that was a Flycket being punched and so I knew that my marketing had actually worked from start to finish whether I was in the restaurant or not.
The measure of the success is such that we have around 150 active customers every week using and sharing Flyckets. We’ve worked out what really sells, what doesn’t appeal and we have massively driven our sales.
Here are some statistics on how Flycket has performed for us:
- In August 2022 we ran the ‘Champagne for £35 a bottle’ offer by email to our database and we sold 2 bottles in the whole month, my assumption was that even if people were interested in the offer they forgot it and/or couldn’t find it when they were in the restaurant. We ran the exact same email template in August 2023 to the same size of database but included a Flycket for the Champagne and made it clear you needed to ‘take’ the Flycket to get the deal and sold 111 bottles the second time . That’s a 5,550% increase in sales, or 55X the number of sales made. My conclusion was that the tangible nature of the Flycket made the offer ‘stick’, it was shared between friends and the act of using the Flycket App and keeping it in the customer wallet meant everyone knew where to find it again later on.
- Of all users that took a Flycket, 33% then shared at least one Flycket with a friend.
- Of all £35 champagne Flyckets in August alone taken (237), 47% (111) were used in the restaurant.
- Of all Flyckets taken in total (3598), 20.1% (724) have been used in the restaurant.
In short for the price of a couple of desserts a month we have breathed new life into our entire marketing strategy with truly game-changing results – if you want your promotions to really work, turn them into a Flycket!
