Olga is the founder of OLLO Restaurant Loyalty which offers expertise in loyalty and CRM for restaurant chains. The company’s key principle is simple: find out what your guests already like, then give them more of that – at scale – to drive sales.

Email segmentation works best for brands with larger email databases in excess of 25,000 contacts. When segmenting for clients, Olga prefers to focus on product preference, dayparting, and spend preference.

Loyalty programs can be an effective way to get customers to share their contact information and share their purchasing information.

There are many email marketing services and tools available to restaurants. In most cases, if a restaurant isn’t getting what they want from the tool, it’s not because of the tool, but because the restaurant isn’t using the tool correctly.

Quotes

“One of the biggest challenges (with email marketing) in the past few years has been the migration of so many people to the Gmail inbox, which has a “Promotions” folder. So a lot of our emails don’t end up as in-box placements.” (Olga)

“The key is figuring out how to become the communication that the recipient wants to open, because you can’t make them. You have to get them to want to do it.” (Olga)

“A lot of the email systems out there today do what’s called segmentation, and I’ve seen it go wrong. For instance, I get Banana Republic emails. Oddly enough, I get more emails about ladies’ dresses than I do about the stuff that I’ve actually bought.” (Joseph)

“Demographics, I think, are long gone. The only place they have meaning is when you’re trying to find people like me in other areas when you grow in scale.” (Joseph)

“Email marketing is the most cost effective way to reach people who actually want to hear from you. Any other way of reaching them would cost you more money.” (Olga)

“It’s not that hard to build email marketing lists, but it’s a shame that more restaurants don’t do it. And once you build the list, you have to do something with it.” (Olga)

Transcript

00:00.00vigorbrandingEveryone today I’m joined by my friend olga lopetegi she is the head of olo restaurant loyalty specialists and we’re going to dive into email marketing and loyalty and all those things that’s gonna be a great conversation. But first olga say hello and give a little bit of backstory.

00:14.18OlgaUm, hey hey Joseph nice and nice to see you here. So yeah I’m Olga Uppategi I’ve been in the restaurant world for close to 20 years now and I’ve um, worked with large restaurant chains over the years actually started out as ah and a very different australian lawyer and oil and gas. Um, so then he came we came to food sort of very roundab boat ways. Um, but for the last sweep. Almost four years now I’ve been running the loyalty consulting firm called olo consult and what we do with help restaurant chains that have loyalty and cm problems essentially around those chains around those problems with less effort and less resources than they would have to apply in-house. So learned a lot along the way about the restaurant restaurant business and the boat. What are the best ways to reach out to you guys. Lots of opinions. Lots of experience there. So happy to share it.

01:13.32vigorbrandingAwesome! So It’s funny because I’m sure a lot of people who are listening already are like email I know how to do that. We do that already I’ve actually heard it firsthand a number of times but there really is a lot of Theory. There’s a lot of information that goes into email marketing. And then there’s a l