How Direct Data Access Enables Powerful Interactions with QSR Customers

An increasing amount enterprise brands across various industries are starting to recognize the value of having a customer engagement platform that lives directly on top of their data rather than outside of a firewall in their own cloud, but the needs are especially acute with Quick-Serve Restaurants (QSRs). But what does this mean?

If you’re trying to scale your marketing at an enterprise level, you can’t afford to be dealing with the time, efficiency, and financial costs of copying and shipping your data back and forth.

Enterprise-level QSR brands are particularly well positioned to benefit from the sort of direct data access MessageGears uniquely provides. That’s both because of how they interact with their customers and how they’re structured as a business.

Here are the three biggest ways direct data access changes the way QSRs interact with their customers:

Offline to Online Offers

Most enterprise industries can’t reasonably expect very frequent purchases by any individual customer and so have to strike at the right moment when the need or desire might be there. But most people eat three meals a day, and it’s not at all uncommon for QSR chain locations to see the same loyal customers either via online or offline orders once a week or more.

That means enticing customers — especially high-frequency customers you can identify through your app and loyalty program — with offers immediately after a restaurant visit can be a great tactic. You know when that customer visits one of your restaurants.

With immediate access to your live data, you can set up a campaign that sends them an offer good in the next few days for a discounted or free item that they just ordered during their visit. Without direct data access, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to strike quickly enough to take advantage of the customer’s good feelings immediately after their meal and lose the chance to turn one sale into two.

A More Updated Inbox

One of our most valued partners, Movable Ink, helps thousands of brands — including many QSRs — to use render-on-open technology to make their emails reflect the most up-to-date data whenever they’re opened. But if the brand uses an ESP like Salesforce, Iterable, or Braze, the lack of direct data access means there’s only so much data the brand can give Movable Ink access to, greatly limiting some of the amazing things they can do with the tool.

With MessageGears, though, direct data access allows Movable Ink to send unlimited API calls and update emails at open based upon any and every data point the brand wants to use. Ensure prices, inventory, featured items, hours, menus, drink specials, and any other data point is live and up to the second every time a customer opens your message. This delivers a better customer experience and helps to build loyalty with your brand in the future.

Distributed Marketing Made Simple

Whether you are from an enterprise QSR brand or not, you know that marketing at the corporate level can only do so much to understand what’s happening on the ground in each individual city — and at each location within that city — where they operate. The local owner or franchisee has their finger on the pulse of their own community, and you’d ideally allow them the freedom to do some email marketing with their own localized spin in order to build loyalty and a better connection with the customers they know well.

Without direct data access, there are all sorts of challenges to overcome to execute this plan, from delays with being able to distribute audiences to local marketers to template adjustments and overall integration from corporate to local. But direct data access makes all this simple, allowing the data to flow easily into a single source of truth for all locations, enabling them to share information live and in real time.

Not to mention, MessageGears’ flexible APIs and quick integration makes it even more streamlined to get everyone on the same page and let the local markets have a level of controlled autonomy that works for the whole team.

Takeaways

For QSRs, direct data access has too much value to delay looking into the opportunity for very long. If you’re stuck with an ESP that’s costing you valuable time and money by copying and shipping data out to their cloud, get in touch and let’s discuss how to make a quick transition to a better platform.