Best of Email Marketing, Customer Review & Data Collection
by
Back of House Staff
Updated January 9th, 2024
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Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective methods for growing your business. According to HubSpot’s Ultimate List of Email Marketing Stats for 2023, a typical return on investment (ROI) for email marketing is a whopping $36 for every $1 spent. Given an estimated 4 billion people use email on a daily basis, odds are good that by implementing an email marketing strategy, you’ll be able to increase your bottom line.
But email marketing isn’t the only thing that will help you successfully scale your business. Data collection – and the insights you gain in the process – are equally important for growth. We’ve found some of the best tech options in these categories to help you take your restaurant to the next level.
Who it's best for: Businesses of all sizes looking for an easy and efficient email marketing solution with built-in analytics.
Things to consider: It’s ideal for drag-and-drop template-style emails, so if you are looking for more customization, MailChimp might not be the best choice for you.
Where it excels: MailChimp merges an easy user interface with comprehensive reporting and analytics about each email you send. It’s also reasonably priced, making it accessible to businesses of all sizes to use according to their varied marketing needs.
Feature overview
Build emails and landing pages using pre-designed templates that include all the content blocks and design elements you need to launch a professional-looking campaign
Generate beautiful custom designs with Creative Assistant, which gets to know your brand and then designs campaigns for you
Manage your marketing holistically with their omni-channel campaign manager
Use advanced analytics and reporting tools to improve your campaigns as you go along
Access 300+ integrations with the most widely used marketing and e-commerce software providers, so you have everything you need in a single location
Receive guided support from an onboarding specialist. It’s live, hands-on, and already included with your subscription
Onboarding and support
The MailChimp support team has won 14 service expertise awards, so it’s no surprise that they offer 24/7 customer support through chat and email. Those with a Premium Plan have special access to guidance over the phone, as well as priority chat and email support.
You can also access tools for DIY support on their Help Center, which has step-by-step video tutorials and guides to walk you through processes at every stage of business.
Pricing
Tier
Who it’s best for
Price
Free
Restaurants who want to easily create email campaigns and learn more about your customers and have less than 1,000 email sends per month
$0
Essentials
Restaurants who want to send the right content at the right time with testing and scheduling features and have less than 5,000 email sends per month
$13/month
Standard
Restaurants who want to sell even more with personalization, optimization tools, and enhanced automations, and have less than 6,000 email sends per month
$20/month
Premium
Restaurants who are looking to scale fast with dedicated onboarding, unlimited contacts, and priority support, with less than 150,000 email sends per month
Customize your surveys, manage customer responses, keep track of operational performance, and improve locations with monthly goals all in one place. With responses funneled into the Tattle dashboard in real-time, you can get a multi-faceted view of your guest experience and brand operations.
Who it's best for: Multi-location hospitality brands looking to improve the customer experience by collecting actionable insights from real customers.
Things to consider: Tattle is an excellent customer review solution for larger operations but could be too expensive and comprehensive for small and mid-sized businesses.
Where it excels: Tattle automatically curates smart recommendations for your restaurants across locations, allowing managers to compile action items to improve the customer experience. The software also helps you to intercept negative reviews by responding to unhappy customers directly in Tattle — manually or automatically — to resolve issues before they surface online.
Feature overview
Prioritize the right things with Tattle’s machine learning that can predict how likely each action will increase revenue and satisfaction
Access specific, intuitive, and customizable insights through the Tattle Dashboard
Dissect operations into granular areas, such as a group of locations, an individual location, ordering channels, date ranges, dayparts, surveys, team members, menu items, etc.
Easily connect to your POS and beyond with over 25 integration partners
Onboarding and support
Explore free guides, templates, and webinars through their Resource Center. As a customer, you’ll have access to their Customer Success team, who provides exclusive data insights and actionable recommendations to help you succeed and troubleshoot issues that arise.
Pricing
Pricing is available upon request. You can contact their team to schedule a demo.
Bikky was built with restaurants in mind. The software solution provides restaurants with a single source of data to better understand guest behavior across a variety of channels and touchpoints in order to make better business decisions.
Who it's best for: Multi-units and emerging brands who are looking for a singular solution to understand their customer data across multiple channels
Things to consider: Bikky makes it easier for restaurants to consolidate data, but it requires an operational system – and staff – that understands how to download the data and, based on the findings, implement a plan of action.
Where it excels: Bikky helps restaurants make smarter marketing decisions by giving them access to their customer data and encouraging actionable insights as a result.
Feature overview
Integrate Bikky with all major delivery, POS, reservation, and loyalty services
View performance based retention, menu items, and location offerings
Create segments based on your learnings, and send them to your marketing platforms
Analyze guest retention and frequency to identify growth opportunities
Measure the revenue impact of your marketing campaigns
Deanonymize guest transactions to get a more complete picture of their behavior
Segment your customers, and drill in to see marketing engagement and order history
Onboarding and support
Access Bikky’s Help Center for answers specific to integrations, reporting, and email marketing. You can also email their support team at support@bikky.com.
Attentive’s “conversational commerce” platform provides all the tools you need to deliver timely messages that your customers actually want to receive. From personalization options to built-in compliance tools, Attentive is a great way to keep your customers engaged.
Who it's best for: Restaurants looking to implement text-based marketing campaigns.
Things to consider: Attentive was not designed specifically for the restaurant industry, so it’s lacking POS integrations and other benefits of being created with restaurants in mind.
Where it excels: Attentive provides each customer with a playbook of best practices and focused support to guarantee successful campaigns. Their team will help you scale and grow your business with a solid return on investment (ROI).
Feature overview
Access best practices and support to quickly make SMS one of your top 3 revenue channels
Scale your list of SMS and email subscribers
Understand your audience with valuable first-party data, and send personalized messages that inspire action
Engage your mobile subscribers, and see more powerful results per message than with email alone
Extend the value of Attentive by integrating with other software in your tech stack
Confidently build a revenue-generating SMS marketing program with compliance at the forefront
Onboarding and support
They have a comprehensive Help Center that’s broken down into categories, so you can easily find what you’re looking for.
Pricing
To learn more about Attentive and their pricing, schedule a demo.
Boostly helps restaurants increase orders, drive reviews, and measure performance through SMS marketing – all while maintaining compliance with SMS marketing guidelines.
Who it's best for: Restaurants that are just getting started with SMS marketing.
Things to consider: Boostly is newer to the SMS marketing space and still working on improving their product.
Where it excels: More than just an SMS marketing platform, Boostly helps you to collect customer data from your existing sources to build a compliant database from your POS and online ordering systems.
Feature overview
Collect customer data from your existing sources, including your POS system, online ordering system, and website in order to build a compliant database
Automate your text-based marketing efforts, including weekly specials and promotions
Get more feedback with online reviews, and address customer issues in real-time
Track your ROI with weekly reports on results across all channels
Onboarding and support
Customers can chat with the Boostly customer service team by sending a note through the contact page section of the website or through email at support@boostly.com. Current Boostly customers report that the customer service team has been very responsive and are “constantly looking to improve their product and seeking feedback” to deliver the best results for their customers.
Pricing
Pricing is available upon request, although they do advertise that there are no contracts or setup fees. Schedule a demo to learn more.
FourTop is a data fusion system that brings all of your restaurant’s data together in one centralized location and prepares it for analysis by every stakeholder and technology system. Their proprietary technology allows you to coordinate actions and decision-making across business units.
Who it's best for: Enterprise and sophisticated multi-units that are looking for a solution to bring all of their data into one centralized platform.
Things to consider: Onboarding is a pretty complex process, because FourTop acts as a consultancy that’s implementing a singular data solution for brands.There’s a lot of customization that goes into the process.
Where it excels: Built specifically for restaurants, FourTop helps to mesh all of your systems together to give you better insights and smarter analytics without any extra steps.
Feature overview
Access data directly from the source systems on a cadence optimized to the business case and the tools in your stack
Process, clean, and de-duplicate data so that records are resolved according to prioritized business logic
Send formatted data into a centralized, predictable structure
Combine data between sources with conflicting records and resolve them according to proprietary system settings
Process records and update in real-time as new information is received
Store data in a resilient, fast, cloud-scale repository, staged in an accessible format for activation via API, webhooks, or direct database transfer
Reconcile and sign off on financial data to ensure complete validation across locations and tech systems
Onboarding and support
Every customer is assigned an account manager to help guide them through the onboarding process and troubleshoot any issues that arise along the way.
Pricing
There are four different integration module options, and FourTop works with you directly to figure out which modules are best for your business needs. Contact the FourTop Solutions team through the contact form on their website to get a custom quote.
Our evaluation process
We’ve developed a process to findthe best marketing technology solutions for restaurants to enhance your marketing efforts. Here’s how we did it.
Surveys and other research with people in the industry
We conducted surveys and gathered feedback from operators and employees across different service models and segments with experience using these systems on a day-to-day basis.
Interviews with Back of House restaurant tech experts
We also gained insights from our staff of experts who have years of experience in the industry and with restaurant technology.
Secondary research
All of this was supplemented with our own research and participation in product overviews and training sessions with vendors on their products and services.
Our tech experts can build you a free, personalized list of marketing systems that fit your needs with one short phone call.
Our tech experts can build you a free, personalized list of marketing systems that fit your needs with one short phone call.
