Evolution of inresto campaigns in 2021
How do campaigns help restaurants?
There are different categories of ordering options available with restaurants- dine-In, takeaway, delivery by aggregators, and delivery by the restaurant. Over the past few years, the share of delivery by aggregators has increased substantially. While there is a claim of an increase in business/revenue, restaurants do not get access to customer data (from aggregators). This hampers the ability of the restaurants to run loyalty schemes and re-target their customers to increase the chances of revisits.
We, at Dineout inresto (B2B arm), build restaurant management solutions. The inresto suite helps restaurants capture valuable user information. One of the products, inresto Campaigns is used by 1500+ active restaurants outlets to reach out to their end diners. During the course of a typical campaign, restaurant outlets make an RoI of more than 20X.
Channels
We, at inresto, presently enable restaurants to use SMS and Email as channels to send communication to their end customers. If you have followed us in the past, you might know that inresto products are used in more than 14 countries. The team has built systems to maintain a high deliverability rate across all geographies. This includes integration with telemarketers active in our location.
Different geographies behave differently when it comes to the reception and regulation of the SMS channel. While there are no whitelisting requirements in the Middle East, India requires all promotional communication to be whitelisted with the operator before a business can send it.
In terms of reception by users, research says that the deliverability rate of SMS can be as high as 98% while that of email is at 20%. Therefore, SMS continues to be a relevant channel for restaurants to reach out to their customers.
DLT regulations
The product team faced a few problems when DoT (Department of Telecommunications) announced the DLT regulations for promotional SMS communication. The new regulation needed restaurants to create their own SMS mask on the DLT portal of telecom operators and whitelist messages before the same can be sent to the end customer.
The operator now expects a template ID along with the whitelisted SMS and sender ID in a promotional message request. In case the content does not match with template ID or if template ID is not mapped to SMS mask, the message will not go through.
Product changes
While adhering to DLT guidelines on a product and tech level, we encountered new problems to solve.
- Restaurants had to be educated and be assisted in getting SMS masks created and templates whitelisted.
- There were chances of restaurants entering the wrong template ID or not choosing the right SMS mask.
- Other issues included triggering promotional content beyond prescribed time by DoT.
Product changes were made to adhere to the compliance requirements, build capabilities to support new guidelines, and UI changes to reduce campaign launch errors by restaurants.
The features were introduced
- To support custom masks on the platform
- To allow template management (to reuse templates without entering Template ID)
- To add validations and guide restaurants to test and launch valid campaigns
Final Result
With the COVID situation getting better in the second half of 2021 and restaurants adopting new guidelines for promotional campaigns, we were able to see recovery in the restaurant business and campaign (product) usage. In terms of #UsersReached, we achieved pre-DLT numbers.
Restaurants found greater benefit while using the product (SMS channel) than in the pre-DLT world. We also witnessed growth and recovery in metrics like the number of users reached.
Solving further pain points of restaurants
Estimating revenue uplift
inresto, being a full-stack player, is in a position to help restaurants with information other players cannot. We help restaurants estimate the revenue generated for each campaign launched. Order value is captured or estimated in the following events:
- Order being punched on point of sale system at the restaurant outlet
- Order received by the restaurant on the dashboard
- Reservation made by the customer
- Feedback shared by end diner for their experience
We have also tried to build transparency for restaurateurs to validate the information from the product.
Lack of marketing team
As a product team, we try to be in constant touch with our clients and understand their pain points that can be solved by us. One of the pain points that we found out in the post-DLT world was the inability to plan campaigns in advance. This is important as there is a TAT by the operator before a message can be whitelisted/ rejected and may need to be requested again for whitelisting. Campaign planning by restaurants now was more crucial than ever.
The second paint point that we discovered is the inability to create good content. This is essential for clients with few outlets who cannot afford to have a marketing team internally or take services of marketing agencies.
Campaign Planning
As product folks, we try to find ways to reduce the load on the tech team and deliver more in a short amount of time. To solve the problem of advance planning, we added a Campaign Calendar that allows restaurants to plan campaigns in advance. The marketing team supports us to update this every quarter.
To additionally help them with content, each of the events also has templates that restaurants can tweak and use to send out to their customer base.
Drag & Drop email builder
While the campaign calendar solves the problem of content for SMS, we have introduced a feature to solve the problem on the email front. Creating good looking HTML that resonates with the brand image of restaurants is essential in email marketing.
Drag & drop email builder, as the name suggests, helps restaurants create good looking, media-rich emails that they can send and reuse in their promotional email campaigns. This brings power to the hands of small and medium-sized restaurants, motivating them to use this channel in an effective manner.
What’s next?
Personalisation
There are still numerous customer problems to solve, however, the one that is very essential in the current scenario is personalisation. The response rate towards communication increases manifolds with personalisation. While it is a long journey that we have to take while making the communication hyper-personalised for the end customer, the first step begins with adding a ‘first name’. While we generate a 360-degree customer profile, we will also add variables like a favourite outlet and favourite item in the future.
Send Time Optimisation
Over time, we have collected data on campaigns launched along with the restaurants. We are in the process of defining attributes and clustering restaurants along with analysing relevant features of the campaign.
Our aim is to first predict the success metric for a campaign. After reaching a stage where our model gives consistently correct results, we move towards intelligent scheduling where the system decides the best time to send a campaign to a particular recipient.
We understand the power of marketing and as a team, we want to give more power to the restaurants while helping them grow. inresto campaigns as a product will evolve to add social media advertising capabilities in the future so that we are able to target the right customer at the right time on the right channels with the right content.
