Restaurant Owner Sees Big Success Using Marketing System
Since 1989 Hershey’s Steak & Seafood has made a reputation for serving superior food with friendly personal service. Located in Lansing, MI, the restaurant serves Certified Black Angus prime rib, fresh seafood and custom aged USDA inspected choice steaks in a fine dining setting.
Scott Hershey and David Finkbeiner are the “active” owners on site, who oversee a seasoned professional staff in the English Pub setting. In the past 14 years, the owners have primarily relied on word-of-mouth to increase the restaurant’s business. “We’ve run ads in several local magazines including one that is distributed to all the hotels and motels in Lansing. We’ve occasionally done television ads but never really had an organized marketing plan,” shares Hershey.
All that has changed in the past few months. “I shifted money from our current marketing budget and turned to direct response marketing. We were able to develop an internal method using software to advertise what we do best and have a concrete way to measure the results. Not being able to measure the results from advertising in magazines or television ads has always been frustrating to me. The whole key is being able to measure your ROI (return on investment) on each campaign that you run. I’ve been looking for a system exactly like that.
In just three months we’ve built a database of over 3700 existing customers. Over 2,000 families and another 1,700 business customers, and those numbers are growing every day. We have found it very easy to collect the data,” says Hershey.
“E-mail is a big item because it reduces overall expenses. Every campaign has been successful. Through Reports, we can tell the effectiveness of all campaigns and make any immediate adjustments. We can compare one against the others and then run only the most profitable marketing campaigns. We are on our way to having a 12-Month Auto-Pilot marketing program. This is easy to do,” continues Hershey.
As soon as some data was collected, Hershey started both birthday and anniversary campaigns. Birthdays showed a 670 percent ROI and anniversaries nearly 300 percent. Hershey’s e-mail programs are showing over 200 percent ROI.
Hershey continues, “The summer months are usually slower than the rest of our year, with families leaving the city for vacations and with the University of Michigan at its slowest point of the year. We figured by the time fall and our busy season came around we would have had some experience with our new marketing plan. The results during the first three months have been very positive. We have generated additional net profits of over $11,000. In our business, getting customers through the door
is really the key to our success. Our goal is to get our current customers to come in an extra time or two throughout the year. These campaigns are doing just that and more, plus they build a good relationship with our customers who appreciate the birthday and anniversary cards and offers.”
The software system not only provides a database to gather customer information but also high quality templates for email, post cards and letters. We have approached our business as a science. We have a system for everything we do. Finally we have a system in place to market our restaurant in a professional manner. And that feels good,” adds Hershey.
