"What are you craving for lunch?"

"What do you want to eat tonight?"

Sound familiar? These are daily conversations people have to reach a mealtime decision. What if your brand could be there to participate and ultimately become part of the consideration set?

We hear a lot from our clients that they want to deliver the right message, to the right guest, at the right time. We’ve written several articles (see here and here) that speak to the message and guest targeting, and this article will be about the time factor. As a restauranteur you need to deliver a message to your guests at the best moment for them and for your business.

One example of how time can impact your restaurant marketing is with email offers and promotions. GetResponse, an email marketing provider, analyzed 21 million email messages and found “emails reach the best results within 1 hour after landing in the inbox”. The question becomes: how do you know the right time to send emails to your guests to achieve the best results?

Now you may have bookmarked an article that says, "Saturdays Boast Highest Open Rates For Email", which may apply if you are sending a blanket email to your entire email list, but when we look at messaging for our clients, we strive to treat each guest uniquely and cater our communications accordingly.

There are two key factors that determine what time is best for you and your guests. The first is time as perceived by the guest, such the day of the week, time of day, etc. The other is the time that guest has been in contact with your business, like how frequently they visit, or how often they have received an email in the past. ??

Building a plan to deliver your messages at the right time starts with knowing more about who your guests are, when they have engaged with your brand and are most likely to respond. ?

We start this by accessing your data streams across your restaurant POS, CRM, and other marketing data channels. Then, using our data management platform, we build a holistic view of your guest. ??With this new view of the customer we are able to add filters to determine customer types, like who is your best guests vs. first time triers based on their buying behavior and interaction with your past marketing messages. Each event or action includes a timestamp which helps us understand their activities on a timeline. ??

Your guests will tell you their time preferences, if you know how to listen. They will tell you when they are ordering online compared to how often they will visit. They will tell you how much time will lapse between sending a mobile text offer and when they will redeem it in store. They will also tell you how likely they are to visit a store after receiving social media promotion. ??

Now it’s up to you to decide what to do with that information. The analysis we provide uncovers opportunities to increase the engagement of your guests over time using a number of factors. Examples such as helping you optimize the day of the week or time of day, how long you should wait after a guest visit to deilver a new message, or what the appropriate content is for that message.

Time is an important factor (of many) in finding the perfect pattern for communicating with your guests. But if you are a large chain, you may have thousands or millions of guests in your database. Personalizing the content and delivery of every message may seem like a pipedream. So how do you accomplish this at scale? Smart, one to one marketing can be achieved by syncing a marketing automation platform with your restaurant databases. The difference between blasting messages to your entire list versus delivering when your guests want them makes a huge difference in your digital marketing effectiveness and engagement.

Being able to deliver a targeted marketing message at the time that's right for your guest means taking the guesswork out of the process and using the guest data you already have to make your marketing better. That benefits your guests and your restaurant's bottom line.

This post was originally written on Zipscene's Food for Thought blog on 12/15/2014 and can be found here: https://blog.zipscene.com/restaurant-marketing-when-is-the-best-time-to-engage-your-guests