• Ep 78: Emily Rugaber / VP of Marketing for Thanx

  • Apr 4 2024
  • Length: 34 mins
  • Podcast

Ep 78: Emily Rugaber / VP of Marketing for Thanx

  • Summary

  • Thanx is a leading loyalty and guest engagement platform for restaurants. The company, founded by Zach Goldstein in 2011, helps businesses embrace digital purchasing, capture greater customer data, and take action on that information to personalize guest engagement.Thanx builds digital UX – mobile apps and web ordering experience – that help restaurants differentiate themselves. Thanx also offers dynamic self-service loyalty programs that help restaurants break free from cookie cutter loyalty programs. Before joining Thanx, Emily was a business intelligence consultant.Restaurants face many challenges when it comes to data, including not having resources to analyze and take action on data available to them. They also don’t have a good way to centralize the data and make it useful. Restaurants also struggle to capture enough data. Many loyalty programs fail to capture enough data because the programs are difficult to sign up for (often requiring an app) and they make customers jump through hoops to use the app or program. Thanx loyalty programs think outside the “Spend X, Get Y” box to offer unique loyalty programs that don’t rely on discounts. That includes offers of special food items or LTOs to loyalty members or all day happy hour for loyalty members. QUOTES “There’s problems associated with getting data and then there’s the problem of doing something with the data (after you get it) that’s meaningful to the business.” (Emily) “Restaurants generally don’t have the resources in house to help them make sense of the data that they have.” (Emily) “Far and away the most common challenge (for restaurants) is that they’re not capturing enough data.” (Emily) “Most revenue is still flowing through in-store channels. This is where loyalty comes in.” (Emily)“Loyalty is the only proven mechanism for broadly capturing data and driving repeat purchasing from it. And yet, most loyalty programs don’t capture enough data.” (Emily) “There are a few restaurants doing loyalty really well. For the rest of restaurants, those loyalty programs are all very similar ‘Spend X, Get Y’ programs. Thanx allows you to build unique, differentiated, bespoke loyalty programs.” (Emily) “Not only do non-discount programs work better, they also cost less.” (Emily) “If you look at why restaurants aren’t personalizing (programs), most of the time it’s not because people think it’s not important or it’s not going to drive results. It’s because it’s really hard to do.” (Emily) TRANSCRIPT 00:00.00vigorbrandingHello Today’s guest is someone who knows a lot about data and loyalty programs which are two extremely important topics for restaurants and any brand for that matter. Our guest is Emily rugabier and she is the Vp of marketing for thanks with an x. So thanks for joining us Emily Rut Gaber I’m sorry I practiced it three times. So. 00:19.99Emily Yeah, happy to be here and you almost got it rugeber very close. Um. 00:27.57Emily So um, yeah, very happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks is a guest engagement and retention platform for restaurants. Ah so that’s kind of a mouthful so I’ll tell you what that means? um. We build digital ux so we build mobile apps and web ordering experiences that help restaurants sort of differentiate themselves their first -party ordering from their third parties as I’m sure this audience knows all too. Well, the third -party platforms are higher margin. They don’t get a lot of data shared with them about the customers. And they’re actually being served ads potentially from competitors on that platform and so there’s a lot of reason to want to have your customers order directly which we help brands do we also offer really dynamic self-service loyalty programs that help restaurants sort of bake. Break free from these cookie cutter programs. You know that they launch and then they never change and many of them don’t drive measurable results and then lastly we’re a complete crm and marketing automation platform really sort of differentiated in terms of ease of use. So. There’s a lot of platforms like ours on the market. We really focus on trying to make marketing as easy as possible. We know that every single restaurant that I talk to when I talk to their marketing team. They say they’re bandwidth constrained and they sort of laugh when I talk about this because it’s so true. 01:51.36Emily And they don’t have time to waste on the mechanics of creating campaigns. They want to do personalized marketing but they want to do it in a way that’s really easy so that they can get it done and prioritize it. 01:59.89vigorbrandingvery cool. very cool so okay so let’s talk data last year nation’s restaurant news said customer data is the Holy Grail of restaurant success and you know we have a data analytics company. We know that mining data is super important. We can learn everything that ...
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