3 Reasons MessageGears is Uniquely Suited to QSR Needs

When marketers for Quick-Serve Restaurant chains (QSRs) think about their cross-channel messaging strategy, they have a few common goals in mind. Among the most important and consistent goals are:

• Drive loyalty
  • Give customers a reason to continue coming back to them regularly
• Prompt immediate buying behavior
  • Get them to either click to order online or stop at the nearest location
• Reinforce brand awareness/immediacy
  • Stay relevant so your name comes up when they’re deciding where to eat

These can sound simple and straightforward, but they’re deceptively challenging goals to consistently meet and scale up to the enterprise level. When you’ve got millions of potential customers in communities all across the United States (or even the world), how do you keep the customer experience fulfilling and relevant to all of them via the various messaging channels? It isn’t easy, but MessageGears’ customer engagement platform is uniquely suited to help. Here’s how:

Personalized images prompt buying behavior

Taking the easy way out with images in emails — using basic stock images or reusing the same pictures of your food to all recipients — is becoming more of a liability as technology allows you to do so much more. And when 92.6% of people say the visual dimension is the No. 1 influencing factor affecting their purchase decision, it’s more important than ever to make image personalization a priority in your messaging.

Chick-fil-A — a MessageGears customer that excels in so many areas of marketing — does a great job of engaging its customers via visual dimensions by including an image of a recently purchased item in emails to their Chick-fil-A One customers. Doing this is a great way to show customers you’re using their data in a fun and relevant way, and to subtly encourage them to purchase from you again. And, assuming they enjoyed the food, this reinforces awareness and hopefully reminds them of a great experience with your brand. Personalized imagery has been shown to decrease cart abandonment by 17%, boost click-through rate by 150%, and improve conversions by 200%. Imagine what improvements like that could do for your business.

MessageGears helps you do this effectively in a number of ways:

• By leveraging a direct data connection, rather than one that must travel between your company’s firewalls and the cloud,real-time data access ensures you’re able to personalize based upon the most recent purchase the customer made every time, using the most up-to-date data you have
• A simple marketer-friendly UI makes it easy for anyone to set personalized images up without any coding involved
• Render-on-open technology (including our partnership with Movable Ink) can even allow these images to update after the email is sent to make the experience as accurate and relevant as possible

Touches on: Prompt immediate buying behavior, Reinforce brand awareness/immediacy

The impact of eliminating data lag on QSR brands

As recently as five years ago, many large QSR brands didn’t even take direct online orders, but recent events have prompted an explosion in digital ordering. Experts are projecting that online ordering revenue for food will hit $220 billion by next year, which would be almost half of all restaurant sales. Takeout nearly tripled in 2020, and digital orders increased by 135% starting in June 2020.

And that all means abandoned carts are extremely relevant for QSR brands — especially, given the nature of the business, the brief windows of time to convert an abandoned cart to an order. The live, real-time data access MessageGears provides is essential if you want to ensure abandoned cart campaigns are sent at the time you want, rather than hours later when they’ve already eaten elsewhere.

Touches on: Drive loyalty, Prompt immediate buying behavior

Using all your data improves the experience

With most email service providers, the amount of customer data you’ll be able to use for personalization purposes will be limited. Because you have to copy the data and send it to their marketing cloud in order to build audiences with it, you’re mostly stuck with the limited number of data points you establish early on. Trying to add new ones can be an arduous, time-consuming process, and that’s if the data you want to use isn’t a privacy risk, at which point your I.T. team will likely say no without even putting in a ticket.

But with MessageGears, all of your data is available to your marketing team at the click of a mouse. Add and subtract data points from an audience simply and easily. Name, location, most recent order, favorite location, favorite items, loyalty level, delivery Zip code, whatever information you collect on customers. MessageGears enables you to use any/all of your customer data within a single email by using modules that stack for natural scrollability by the customer.

Touches on: Drive loyalty, Reinforce brand awareness/immediacy

And that’s how you raise the bar for QSR customer experience. By making your customers feel like you’re using relevant data points about them in a fun and responsible way that they enjoy, you’ll breed passionate loyalty over time. And when they start thinking about where to eat, you’re always one of the first they consider.