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.

Restaurants can take a page from the Delta playbook – which includes the potential for free first class upgrades (a perk that costs nothing to Delta) – including the use of secret menu items.

Loyalty programs should not be dependent upon an app because most consumers won’t download the app. Instead, the loyalty program should be embedded in the web ordering experience. The app is still useful, as users of a restaurant’s app have high lifetime value.

Consumers respond to non-discount offers quite effectively. For example, a restaurant can offer loyal customers a VIP experience that allows those customers to try new menu items (along with a non-VIP friend) before the items are available publicly.

The entry point into a loyalty program shouldn’t be by downloading an app. What Thanx does is builds the loyalty enrollment into the digital ordering experience because 70% of online ordering comes via the restaurant’s website, not via an app.

Quotes

“The playbook is pretty simple. You need to own the relationship with your customer, because if you sacrifice that to the third party, then you have no control over their lifetime value.” (Zach)

“Loyalty is no longer about just rote rewards programs and discounts and more around personalization. That really matters, because as you deliver more personalization, you become less dependent on discounts as your loyalty mechanism and can still be effective.” (Zach)

“Can you imagine what McDonald’s top one percent customers would do if they had year round McRibs? That’s the type of thing people care about.” (Zach)

“There are a lot of restaurant leaders who have been convinced that the app is the answer. It’s actually not the answer. It’s one answer to a bigger need.” (Joseph)

“Data is king. At the end of the day, you have to have data. And there’s no other way in the restaurant business to capture that data unless you have a loyalty program.” (Zach)

“It’s really hard to drive repeat purchasing if you don’t know who your best customers are. That’s the value of data. It’s a risk to not have it and it’s an opportunity when you have it.” (Zach)

Transcript

00:00.00vigorbrandingEveryone today I am joineded by my friend Zach Goldstein he is the Ceo and founder of thanks a system that we are going to dig into but we’re going to talk about a lot of other things today too before we do Zach say hello give a little bit of backstory.

00:15.63Zach GoldsteinYeah, pleasure. Really happy to be with you. My background started before thanks and working with restaurants and retailers to to really build customer lifetime value and that has become a passion of mine. Ah, That’s really what thanks does targeted at Restaurants. How do we help them identify where their best customers are and make more of their customers. Those best customers.

00:38.65vigorbrandingI Love it. So a few years ago you you penned an article and I think this this is what really struck me and um, you know serves as a basis for the episode a little bit but that article is called the 4 horsemen of the restaurant apocalypse which of course is a very doom gloom. It’s very like whoa. Um, what does that mean and I think the article centers on taking some lessons from the travel industry and the effect that online travel agencies otas for short had on evolving our experiences as travelers