Marketing funnels have been all the craze recently.
But they have only really been effective for online businesses such as e-commerce stores and other businesses with online transactions.
The reason is because marketing funnels are supposed to be highly trackable, so having the end-to-end tracking from customer traffic source all the way to customer purchase is much easier for online businesses. It’s much easier to connect the data from online transactions to online traffic sources, whereas it is much more difficult to connect the data from offline transactions to online traffic sources.
Since first hearing about marketing funnels, I’ve been on a mission to find out how I can apply the same concept to businesses with offline transactions such as restaurants, retail, etc. I still believe that these businesses have an advantageous position in the marketplace and they deserve to have the same or similar efficient tools that online businesses benefit from.
I’m happy to say that I finally found a way to create an end-to-end marketing funnel for a restaurant business. I’m able to see how the customers initially found the restaurant and how much they ended up spending at the restaurant. I’m even more happy to be sharing it with you today!
Marketing funnels usually have 3 steps involved.
- Traffic
- Leads
- Sales
In this writeup, I’ll teach you how I sourced these three pieces and exactly how I structured them to create a marketing funnel that produced an additional $10,575.70 in sales within 3 months for a restaurant.
When creating a marketing funnel, you usually want to work backwards. Since sales is the last step, let’s start there. At this stage of the funnel, the buyer and seller are making a transaction.
Just like how a marketing funnel can track transactions online, I had to make sure that I could track transactions, which I’ll get into later in this post.
So the best question to ask yourself here is, “What am I selling?”
For this restaurant, they had many items on their menu. However, they were trying to attract more birthday celebrations.
Okay, so now that we know what we want to sell, we have to try to get people interested. Luckily enough for this restaurant, they already had a promotion method in place for getting people to reserve or walk in with a birthday celebration. To attract birthday celebrations, they offered a $20 gift certificate and free scoop of ice cream.
It was a very attractive offer, but before I built this marketing funnel for them, they told me that they didn’t know how people were finding out about it. Their system, at the time, was that they posted a static birthday coupon on their website. Some people printed it out and brought it to the restaurant, however there weren’t many.
When I heard that, I thought of this as a perfect funnel hack opportunity. My plan was to take their current offer, turn it into a landing page to capture email leads and drive them towards the restaurant after they signed up.
So, I designed a simple landing page that explained the birthday offer with a call to action for the viewer to sign up.
This was how we got leads for the restaurant.
Just like how a marketing funnel can track sales and transactions, a good marketing funnel is also supposed to track which leads turned into sales and transactions. I’ll also get into how I tracked this later in this post.
Now that we know how we would capture leads for birthdays, we now needed a traffic source.
With most new online businesses, it is very difficult to get traffic unless you run ads. This is where local businesses shine. Local businesses hold much more weight in online search engines like Google and Yelp than online businesses.
My previous experience would have told me to buy ads and drive that traffic towards the landing page, but I had a much better idea.
Why not use the high local ranking and organic traffic they already had and funnel them into my landing page?
So that’s exactly what I did. I made a popup on their website home page that led to the landing page. Basically, all the Google search and Yelp search traffic they already had… was mine!
Alright, so we have these 3 pieces in place for the marketing funnel. We have the POS system, which records the transactions. We have the landing page, which acquires the email leads, and we have the traffic sources from organic search.
Now, how do we connect all 3 so that we can track from traffic source all the way to the transaction on the POS system?
The first place we are going to start is the email leads. The email leads are basically the profiles of each person that signed up. In fact, we can attach any data we want to the email addresses which people submitted.
You can call our list of email addresses a restaurant CRM.
Here is what the current list of email addresses looks like for the restaurant I set up this funnel for:
Pretty cool, huh? Not only does it have the names and email addresses of each person that signed up, but it also tells me how they found the landing page, how many times they visited the landing page before they actually signed up, and you can also see if they ended up going to the restaurant (more on this later).
I go over how to set up all this data collection in my restaurant CRM writeup which you can open in a new tab and read later to enhance the current funnel you are building.
For now, let’s continue on with tracking. To track the amount of sales that came from our email leads, we have to somehow match the email leads to the transactions that happen in the POS system.
POS systems can recognize transactions usually with a coupon code that was attached to the check.
In order to attach a coupon code to the check, we have to give the customer a coupon code so they can show it to your staff and your staff can enter it into the POS system to apply it to the check.
Coupon codes can also be accepted in other ways such as the customer’s own phone or device, but if done this way we cannot see how much the customer spent unless we attach the data manually.
In another write up I went over how we can create coupon codes from a POS system or from a coupon validation system I can generate coupon codes and verify coupon codes for the restaurant.
If you don’t have either of these options, you can always do a bit of manual work by asking your staff to look at the email that was sent to the customer, then record the customer’s name and email address along with the check amount and party size. Your staff can then input this data in a Google Sheet that you can share with each to track sales from the marketing funnel.
Here is an example of a Google Sheet I set up for a client that has the necessary columns to track the name, email address, party size, and check amount for each customer that came in for the birthday offer.
You can use this same Google Sheet, make a copy of it and send it to your manager to fill out before they close up for the day.
There’s one last thing you want to do to make sure you know who has come in from your marketing funnel or not.
You have to tag each email address of the person that came in. So, we have to make a connection from your Google Sheet to Mailchimp.
There’s a free software that can recognize the email address in your Google Sheet, match it to the email address in Mailchimp and tag that email address with “Birthday Coupon Used” or any tag that you want.
To do this:
- Sign up for Zapier.
- Set up your account.
- Use this Zap that I created: https://zapier.com/app/editor/template/92084
- Fill out the fields in the template with your own Google Sheet and Mailchimp naming conventions.
- Follow my video tutorial: youtube
Well well, now you have a fully functionable and trackable restaurant marketing funnel.
A funnel that helps you collect email addresses from people interested in any offer, discount, coupon etc that you may have, and then tracks if they used that offer inside your restaurant.
There are some more enhancements you can add to this funnel like:
- Asking for a review
- Following up for next visit
- Sending upsells like gift cards, merchandise, catering, franchising, etc.
I go over each of these enhancements in later writeups.
Now the question for you is, which coupon, offer, discount, etc will you track for your restaurant using this method?
