“Clients are operating in a highly competitive environment today,” says Barb Olson, senior VP of client solutions at Cogensia, “and they have to find ways to differentiate their brands to get, keep, and grow more customers.”
 
Olson, along with Jen Gulvik, senior VP of marketing, creative director with Houlihan’s Restaurant Group, will present a session titled “Driving Cust Loyalty through Personalization” at this year’s Loyalty Expo in Orlando.
 
“We’re a relatively small company, but we have quite a robust email database,” says Gulvik. “Our average store has about 12,000 customers in its email database and some have as many as 20,000. However, historically we have really not done much segmentation with our list or had a lot of mass messaging to the entire database.” 
 
That has changed recently as Houlihan’s IT department partnered with Cogensia who helped the restaurant chain add even more layers to the existing customer and transaction data. “Now we’re using third-party data to really get more granular with our messaging,” says Gulvik.
 
And while Houlihan’s email database is sizeable, it represents only 1 percent of the chain's customer base. "What we’ve been able to do with our new CRM capability,” Gulvik adds, “and that third-party data, is find a lot of customers in that other 99 percent that previously we had no way of reaching. Now we can find them in channels like Facebook, email, and direct mail.”
 
Nearly every restaurant and retailer have an e-club, but many are not able to differentiate the communications of their customer experience. To that end, Gulvik and Olson will show how Cogensia and Houlihan's Restaurant Group are transforming the latter’s e-club to 1:1 marketing to increase customer loyalty and drive more restaurant sales.
 
“We’re going to look at things like how Houlihan's has expanded their audience to talk to more current customers,” says Olson. The pair will also discuss how the partnership found ways to identify more of Houlihan’s current customers, as well as highlights of how they are evaluating, highlighting, and segmenting the chain’s patrons.
 
Also, included will be a section on how Houlihan's is building out relevant 1:1 communication experiences. “We’ll tell you how we’re doing that,” adds Olson, “and how Cogensia is giving them real-time access to their customer data, delivering automated, personalized campaigns, and then closing the loop with real-time purchase data to evaluate how well campaigns are doing.”
 
Loyalty Expo, the true Voice of the Customer-driven and best practice-focused customer loyalty conference, will be held May 2nd through the 4th at the Caribe Royale Hotel & Convention Center in Orlando, Florida.