Restaurant Loyalty Programs: How to Turn More Guests into Repeat Customers

00:06 — Anthony Presley: 

Tell me a little bit about yourself. 

 

00:07 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

Introduce yourself. Yes, I’m Olga Lopategui, or Olga Berkovich Lopategui, if you want to be more precise. The last name is Puerto Rican and the accent is Russian. So now that we got that out of the way, I run a company called Restaurant Loyalty Specialists and we do exactly what it sounds like. We specialize in helping restaurant chains with their loyalty programs. Strategy, execution, analytics. Nothing in between. 

 

00:33 — Anthony Presley: 

Love that. Well, we’ve known each other a couple of years. 

 

00:36 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

I think it’s more than that. 

 

00:37 — Anthony Presley: 

Okay. I was just gonna give us some leeway here. Some quick questions while we’re here. Everybody wants to talk about loyalty, guest retention. This is a, this is a major topic right now with the economy the way that it is. 

 

00:49 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

Yep. 

 

00:50 — Anthony Presley: 

So do you have any high level thoughts before we get into deeper ones? 

 

00:54 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

High level thoughts? There is no magic. 

 

00:56 — Anthony Presley: 

No. That’s very disappointing. I was hoping for the magic button, the easy one. 

 

01:00 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

There is no magic button. We don’t have a magic button. Anybody who tells you there’ the magic button for retention of guests is probably slightly exaggerating. So at the foundational, the core of all of that is you got to get your operations in a good place. 

 

01:15 — Anthony Presley: 

Okay. 

 

01:16 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

And make sure you don’t lose guests due to operational issues. And then we, on the loyalty and marketing side can help a little bit to make it a little bit better. But there is no marketing magic in return. 

 

01:29 — Anthony Presley: 

Oh, that’s. I mean, there’s a lot of vendors out running around talking about like AI and the easy button and the one to one marketing and. Are you saying that maybe there’s some hocus pocus? No. 

 

01:41 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

It helps. It helps. It definitely helps if you are able to figure out when the guest that should have come in is unable to come in or didn’t come in. They usually show up every two weeks and they’re a little bit overdue. If you can hit them up with the right message at the right time, you’re much more likely to get them back. You may also be able to accelerate the visit if you hit them with the right message. That’s a piece of the marketing magic and that’s very helpful, especially in the scenarios like now where every guest counts, every dollar counts, and so on. Foundationally, you can only do that if your operations are good, if the orders are correct. So you can’t use marketing to fix operational problems. 

 

02:28 — Anthony Presley: 

I love that you need a T shirt for that. 

 

02:30 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

I know you have a T shirt for that. I’ll take it. 

 

02:32 — Anthony Presley: 

Yeah, no, we need to get one. You can’t use marketing to fix operational problems. 

 

02:36 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

However, for brands that actually are really good at operations, marketing really helps because you can squeeze another couple percent here, a couple percent there. It’s not going to be magical, but it’s going to make a difference. Okay, so loyalty, marketing, retention, marketing, all of that, like, I view it as just an additional marketing channel. It’s not. It’s not anything magical. And marketing channels in restaurants, they don’t trade, they don’t create magical momentum. 

 

03:09 — Anthony Presley: 

I gotcha. 

 

03:09 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

It’s incremental improvements, but they all add up over time if you do it correctly. 

 

03:14 — Anthony Presley: 

Okay, well, you mentioned the right message. How do brands find the right message? How do they. Is there, is there a Google Doc for that? Like, where do you find the right message? 

 

03:25 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

So the right message is different for every brand. And unfortunately, back to no magic, you find out through trial and error. Okay, you send the message, you look how they responded, you send another message, you look how they responded, and that’s how you find the right message. And that’s not just the message. It’s the offer. It’s the subject line. And it’s really, a lot of it is about testing and making sure that when you send the message out, you know, how did people that get the message to respond compared to people that did not get the message? Which means control group. So you called out a bunch of people from every message, say, hey, if we didn’t target them with this message, what did they do? 

 

04:04 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

And if they behave exactly the same as people that got the message, you know, your message probably didn’t do anything. Right. So we have theories around what works, what types of brands, like, what’s a good message, offer for quick service, chicken brand, or what is a good message or offer for, I don’t know, Boba tea brand. I just got a boba tea sample, so it’s top of mind for me. So we have our series, but they don’t really matter much. They’re a starting point until you actually start running campaigns and measuring campaign results and say, oh, yeah, they do respond to percentage of versus dollar off surprisingly better. 

 

04:41 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

Or, you know, they want to see whatever the last thing that they ordered from us, they want to see that in the subject line because they really probably liked it and that makes them open the mail. Yeah, I remember that drink. 

 

04:54 — Anthony Presley: 

So got it. Okay, so there’s not a magic easy button. AI may help. And you need to make sure that operations is really humming along. 

 

05:05 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

Yep. 

 

05:06 — Anthony Presley: 

Okay, this sounds like work. 

 

05:08 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

It is work. All of it is all of them. All of it is work. I’m waiting for the moment when AI will magically solve all of this. And I like, I think I mentioned to you previously, like I ran this study where I interviewed 50 different restaurant marketers that work with loyalty programs about their loyalty programs. And many of them were saying, well, I would just like to be like get into my loyalty system. And the loyalty tool just says, oh well, you should send the buy one, get one free offer to this group of people. And then it just like sends it and it’s all gone and it’s out the window and it’s working. 

 

05:46 — Anthony Presley: 

Right. 

 

05:47 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

And that sounds absolutely wonderful. But A, we’re not there yet. B, you’re probably going, if that’s your brand, you’re probably going to freak out because you are not entirely sure how well the cost is going to be controlled. Does your CRM tool know what your inventory situation look like? Is it going to start promoting something that’s almost out of stock or not promoting something that should be promoted because it’s too much in stock? There is the weather considerations, there’s government, everything. The system still does not know about the real world. 

 

06:18 — Anthony Presley: 

Right. 

 

06:19 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

But more, the most scary part of it is that most modern CRM systems are not really good at throttling. And so throttling is when you end up. Throttling is what helps you when you accidentally over message people. 

 

06:33 — Anthony Presley: 

Right. 

 

06:33 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

Which happens with a lot of brands that you’ve ever received two or three emails from a brand on the same day, so they’re having throttling issues. So that is very hard to manage. Let’s say if you let AI just run loose today, if you let it just run loose and say like, hey, deploy campaigns for me. 

 

06:49 — Anthony Presley: 

Right. 

 

06:50 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

Chances of overlap and segments and people getting the same messages or similar messages at the same time and not them not being prioritized correctly is extremely high because nobody has thought through that system yet. 

 

07:03 — Anthony Presley: 

Okay, okay, that makes sense. Two last questions here. One, have you seen anybody doing really good one to one marketing? Any brands stand out and how do you think they got there? That seems to be the holy grail. 

 

07:16 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

I honestly don’t know because you can’t from the outside, you can’t tell if it’s one one or not. 

 

07:23 — Anthony Presley: 

Okay, that’s fair. 

 

07:24 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

You shouldn’t be able to tell. 

 

07:25 — Anthony Presley: 

Right, right. 

 

07:26 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

I mean, yeah, all of them. Yeah. So I know that many brands do, you know, deploy different marketing, different people. Because when I look at Starbucks or Chipotle My husband and I, we have different offers at Chick Fil A. Yeah. So we have different offers, we have different messages. Is it one one? Is it batch? Who knows? 

 

07:44 — Anthony Presley: 

Right. 

 

07:45 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

So it’s really hard to tell. So the brands that I work with, nobody’s doing true, like 100% one one because it is very difficult to do. But many of our clients do sophisticated small benchmarking. 

 

07:57 — Anthony Presley: 

Okay. Okay. Love that, Love that. Second question. Kind of putting you in the hot seat real fast. If someone just comes into a marketing role at a brand and it’s their first day, first week, what’s something they can do to have some immediate impact? 

 

08:13 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

Marketing role or loyalty role? 

 

08:15 — Anthony Presley: 

I’ll take either one. 

 

08:17 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

Loyalty role, immediate impact. I would say do a thorough assessment of what your program is doing. 

 

08:25 — Anthony Presley: 

Okay. 

 

08:26 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

And understand where the gaps are. Like, start by understanding the system instead of just starting to act like there is some kind of urgency to act like. Loyalty moves at glacial pace. 

 

08:38 — Anthony Presley: 

Right. 

 

08:38 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

You cannot just like turn it on and then like magic. Nothing is. There’s no magic. 

 

08:42 — Anthony Presley: 

And everybody’s suddenly loyal. Yeah. 

 

08:44 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

Nobody. Nobody’s ever loyal. Just because you started a loyalty program does not happen that way either. Sadly, it’s a misnomer. Loyalty program should be rewards program. They don’t create loyalty, they create behavior change, which may generate loyalty for some. 

 

08:57 — Anthony Presley: 

Right. So. 

 

08:58 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

But I would say understand what’s happening and don’t be in a hurry. 

 

09:01 — Anthony Presley: 

Okay. 

 

09:02 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

Because yes, you want to get it done, but you want to get it right. 

 

09:07 — Anthony Presley: 

Gotcha. Gotcha. 

 

09:08 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

That’s my two sons. 

 

09:09 — Anthony Presley: 

Love that. Well, thanks for hanging out. 

 

09:11 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

Thank you. Woohoo. We’re green again. We are green. We’re green again. 

 

09:15 — Anthony Presley: 

Thank you so much. 

 

09:16 — Olga Berkovich Lopategui: 

Thank you.