It’s Reservations Time! So what did we learn from doing live videos that you as a restaurant owner can benefit from and begin doing immediately.
Transcript of the Video: A Benefit To All Restaurant Owners
Well, we’re back, Andrew, it’s now been many days in a row and we’ve been doing a lot of our Reservations. Oh, by the way, if this is the first time you’ve been here, my name is Jeff Harrison. I’m with Reservations. I’m Andrew McCauley with Reservations as well. At the end of the day, we own a company called Swing Point Media and we specifically work with restaurants and help them get more, as you say,
bums on seats.
Right! In other words, that’s why we call this Reservations. The goal of the show, if this is the first time you’ve arrived, our goal is to share with you either from us or people we interviewed that are in the restaurant industry, are running it there in the trenches, if you will, and have them share, hey, what’s happening for them that’s been successful? So yesterday, if you miss yesterday, go back and check it out. It’s on the Swing Point Media site. It’s also on Jeff Harrison site. We interviewed an incredible lady. Her name is Debbie Alexander down at Peabody’s Cafe in Palm Springs. Tell us a little bit about Debbie.
Debbie of Peabody’s Cafe
Debbie was great. She’s been there for, hey, hello Lane. Hey guys, who are watching. She’s been there for 24 years. She’s been there. She’s been there personally for 24 years running this restaurant in Palm Springs. Now if you’re not from Palm Springs area, it does get hot here. Very hot. In fact, it gets so hot that many people leave town when it’s summer, which is about now because we’re averaging 110 right now, which is bearable, but when it gets to a 120, it’s pretty damn hot. So what happens here is a lot of people leave town. Restaurants decided to close. Not all of them. Some of them decide to close down because they just don’t have the business or the preparation for the lack of business.
So we went and we thought we’ll go and interview some people that have stuck through the temperature because there were a lot of locals that still live here. And it’s more of a tribute to people that stick through it and find out what they’re doing, why are they still open through summer and how can they attract audiences.
You Only Get That From Being In Business For A Very Long Time
She was great because she was explaining all sorts of her target market or her market. She looks at some fascinating insights. She looks at the hotel rates of the local hotels and if the hotel rates drop suddenly everyone from LA, which is about two hours drive away, comes down for the sun because in LA it’s about 20 or 30. Sometimes more degrees cooler and people want to have the hot weekend or whatever it is. So they come away, the hotels drop their prices. So she watches that and she knows that she can correlate the busyness of her restaurant with the temperature in LA and the prices of the hotels in here in Palm Springs. So, which I thought was a very good insight.
You only get that from being in business for a very long time. You know, if you opened up a restaurant and you’ve been open for three years or less, you’re not going to see that sort of data, you’re not going to know that sort of activity. So that was pretty fascinating.
You know why I thought that it was really cool. She says she doesn’t really care how it is here. She looks at the weather in LA as you said, and if it’s overcast and drizzly, she said not raining because if it’s raining a lot, the Californians, we don’t know how to drive in the rain. So if it’s overcast like that June gloom or it’s unusual, like I think there’s some fog on the coast this weekend. It could be a great weekend down there in Palm Springs. I thought that was really cool.
Squirrels And Nuts
You know, the other thing that I liked that she said was understanding and we see that we’re a restaurant opens up and they open up and they peek in season and then they go out of business in the summer. One of the things she said about that Andrew, I thought was just fascinating is that she said they have to probably pour back in about a third of whatever they made during the season to keep their restaurant afloat during that offseason. If they don’t have the data and they’re not doing what she’s doing. I mean two decades in the restaurant industry, in a destination proper air environment that’s amazing.
Squirrels and nuts, she collects the nuts when it’s a busy time so she can eat them during some of basically. You know, what else was funny, she, she knows a couple of other options. There are lots of restaurant owners, but she’ll see the newbies, you know, lapping it up, having all this money come in when its peak season for us and they’re going out and they’re eating steaks and lobsters and spending it up and buying all this cool stuff. And then gets to summer period. Suddenly they’re like, holy crap, we’ve got no cash, nothing. We’ve got nothing to buy food with. She just says to them, you shouldn’t be doing that because there’ll be times when you need that cash later and not now. So, uh, I felt that was quite interesting.
We Have A Relationship
So these are things if you’re new to the show, you can catch up on this. You can go back and look over the videos. But those are the kinds of things you’re going to hear from the restaurant owners. From us, you’re going to hear more specifically, probably more marketing ideas, like, as an example of us doing this live show every day. I’ll give you a couple reasons I think it’s good for our company is one, is it allows us to go out and meet and be on the street with the people that are our ideal customers. You know, we can go out and speak with Debbie and whether she becomes a client or not. That’s one of the things I want to point out, especially for you watching and if you’re a restaurant owner, we’d love to have you as a guest.
There’s no pressure. We never roll out any sales things while we’re there or anything like that. It’s all about you and now we have a relationship. We started with Debbie and if somebody says, Hey, I saw you on there, what are those guys like? She can actually genuinely say, you know, they ate my breakfast. They drank those bloody Marys. They were virgins because we’re still working. But the idea is there’s a human behind that, right? So we love that kind of thing.
The other part that I thought was really good is we really get to know the environment. Like I live in a part of a valley that’s quite away from Palm Springs and when you go to Palm Springs you walk down the on the streets.
It’s A Destination Place
It doesn’t matter how hard it is, Jeff. It’s a destination place as you said. And you know, come from Europe, you come from Kennedy, come from anywhere else. We know what the heat is, but people on holidays, what heat? They’re happy to have the heat because they can sit by a pool day, not get cold. That’s why they’re coming to these tropical or these hot places for. We forget that because we’re living it 24/7 for six months. I think there are 100 days in a row. We have more than 100 something degrees so far. Uh, it’s damn hot, still hot. I’ve actually got a forecast for the next three months. It’s going to be 100+ up until about October. It’s got to be the easiest job in the world to be the weatherman here in the desert.
It’s probably going to be hot enough for your party in August. It’s going to be hot. So those are some of the takeaways. Now we want to talk a little bit about, because we said, hey, at the very beginning this is all about how can you build a database because I want you to remember that maybe you haven’t heard it here first, but when you have a database, all things are possible. Let me give you an example. Let’s say, for instance, Andrew owns a restaurant and I own a restaurant. Andrew has built his database and he has let’s say a thousand names in his database. We’ve owned the businesses exactly the same period of time. I don’t have a database, so whenever I want traffic or I need somebody, bums in the seat, I have to do something to trigger that and usually through advertising.
How Does Database Works?
It’s also a time where it’s almost a different mindset. There’s some desperation, especially when we see a season change. There’s desperation. I always have to be fueling. It’s like our car. We got to keep putting gas in it. What would be the difference because you have a database, Andrew that you would have that I wouldn’t? Well, I can tell you this from a sudden experience as well and just some just some clients that we have in client numbers is that every person that we have on some of these clients’ databases is worth $3 to them. Now, what I mean by that is that we’ve got a client that’s got a thousand people in the database and we know that on average, not every single post one on average, every time a person it gets added to our database, we can email everybody out.
Now we don’t. That doesn’t cost us anything. Send an email, hey, today’s special is pork sandwiches, right? Send that email. We know that on average the amount of people across the board or out of those thousand people will bring in enough money to represent $3 per name. So I’ve got a thousand people on my database and I send an email out of all of the people in my database. I’ll get people, I’ll get $3,000 come back in, in revenue into my restaurant because I’ve worked with those people and created that database and they know and trust me. So when I come in and say there’s this, there’s a pork sandwich, special company up and I hit that send, I can pretty much bank on it, then I’m going to get $3,000 come back into my venue just from that email. So it’s, it’s very predictable.
Email Database And Email Marketing
Unlike if I run an ad, I don’t know if it’s going to work or not, right. When we talk about this because this just happened yesterday with one of our clients. We had been, we just sent out a new email to his database, right? Give us an idea because we hear that story of email database and email marketing is dead. Give us some numbers that are true. Like, hey, these are fresh on our mind and just happened to our client yesterday. Okay. So, uh, this particular one has 450 people in his database. We send out an email that had an open rate of nearly 45%. I mean come on 45%. Did you say 45%? Forty-five percent of the name of that doesn’t happen. Usually, if you get 20 you’re doing well. He had an open rate of a 45 percent.
So of that, of those people that opened up 30% of those people actually clicked through to the offer that we had. That’s amazing. It really is. So now we’re just waiting for because it only happened in the last two days. We’re waiting for the redemption rate. We haven’t got to redemption rate there, but people are opening it. They’re looking at it, they’re aware of what’s going on and it hasn’t cost the owner of this business a cent to get back in touch with these people who were on this database.
That’s How We Work At Numbers
No. Andrew, in this particular case, that customer, we know their average spend was $16.23, right? So now let’s just do the numbers. So let’s make it easy. Four hundred and basically, let’s just call it 40%. That’s 160 people that clicked through and then you said half of those or about a third of those. That’s the 200. So let’s call it 60 or 70. Seventy will come in. So if you do the math, 70×16 is about a thousand dollars. That’s right. That’s exactly if you look at, we’ve got 500 people on that list. It’s $2 a name is what I’m saying. So it’s not bad. So that’s what I’m saying. That’s how we worked the numbers out. Every time he sends an email out, he’s, almost guaranteed he’s going to get $2 per name on his database. So we build the database.
The more numbers that we get on that database, the better is it’s going to be for, for him down the track. Now, instead of us going into some deeper or really complicated process of how we do this, we want to invite you to something we’re going to start doing every Thursday morning. Now you do have to sign up for it. You just go to our website, right? You go to website swingpointmedia.com, is it right on the homepage. We’re doing a very intimate and there are only about 7 to 10 spots available because we want it to be totally interactive, so if you have questions, we want you to be interactive. You’ll be able to see us and our screens and whatnot.
Get Registered
The idea is we’re going to do a webinar every Thursday at 9:30 AM, Pacific time So make sure you, if you’re in a different time zone, just check that out, but once you get registered, you’ll get the information. The idea is we’re going to walk you through exactly what we do for this customer that Andrew just described so that hey, either we can help you do it and you can become one of our clients because we believe in return on investment.
In other words, if it costs a thousand dollars for us to do our thing that you make that and more because there’s no reason to say, hey, we made a thousand bucks. You made 300. That’s not a win-win. So we invite you to go to our website, swingpointmedia.com, right on the homepage. You’ll see the signup tab there for the Webinar. It’s every Thursday starting this coming Thursday. You didn’t miss one yesterday because we’re just starting this. We’d love to have you attend and gets your feelings and your thoughts and hey, can you implement this?
Most of the time what we see Andrew is the business owner is really, they’re so engaged in what they’re doing on daily basis to take on another task like we’re talking about is virtually impossible. And when they turn it over to a staff member who is also busy, it has a, it has a fail rate. So what do we do? Just kind of a 30, maybe 37,000-foot overview of what they can expect.
We Take Over Basically The Marketing
Well, we take over basically the marketing. We’ll bring in the customers for you. We’ll find them, we’ll bring them in. We’ll show you an ROI every day, 24/7 live. You get to see basically over our shoulder what we’re doing. It’s almost like saying, oh, I want you to sit in my office and see what you’re doing. We’ll give you that ability to do that. Like, whoa, there’s a whole bunch of other things that happen when we do this. We’ve got engagement happening on your social media profile. We’ve got reviews. Not a big part of a business, right. Just talking to some people, some restaurant that ended yesterday, they were like bitching about how many reviews they had been there for a long time versus someone else’s just newly opened goal reviews while the people that were newly opened knew how to drive those reviews.
We do that. That’s all part of what we can do as well. So there’s all this stuff, it’s taken off your hands as the restaurant owner or the manager. You don’t have to do anything else. We do it for you, which is, hey, who wants that? Me? And it’s no extra work for the staff either. So we’re not giving you ridiculous loyalty programs that you’ve got to take a Ph.D. to understand what to do and then once you’ve got it, what do you do with it? We do all that sort of stuff for you. So basically we look after it and we’ll get you an ROI that you were just blown away with. Yeah.
Big Takeaway That We Learned Today
So that’s on Thursdays. Again, this is not a big push for that. If you want to come in there, you know, we speak to, we’re fortunate on our videos. We’re seeing several hundred video views a day on the video, so we appreciate that. So this is a very limited seven to 10 people and we’d love to have you there. So the big thing takeaway today is what we learned, a lot of cool things on how people market here in the desert too, that are unique that you’re not going to learn unless you’re belly to belly with them and they tell you, hey, how it’s working in the trenches.
The other thing is database marketing. If you don’t have a database, you’re already fighting an uphill battle because you’re constantly going to have to be advertising and spending money in hopes to attract that next new customer. Instead of saying, Hey Andrew, you love eating here. Let me just send something out to remind you to come on in. So that’s really all I have today. Andrew. Yeah, I’m just running for a truck to come past. It has been really quiet. We haven’t seen one yet. If, if that’s. If that’s ivy head, don’t worry about it. Hey, I’m Jeff Harrison. I’m Andrew McCauley. We’ll see you again next time on Reservations. Bye. Bye.
SwingPointMedia is a marketing company focused on using content marketing, such as written articles, video and podcasts, to attract their customers ideal audiences. This approach has proven to attract higher quality customers while simultaneously reducing the sales cycle by as much as 70%.
SwingPointMedia serves local businesses in Southern California and can be reached by calling 760-422-5176.
You are invited to also attend a free weekly presentation, providing you the tools and strategy to roll out your own content marketing program for your company, or see exactly what SwingPointMedia does for its clients to achieve success. It can be viewed live on SwingPointMedia’s YouTube channel, at 11 am pst.