Hello my name is Megan Longo. I am the marketing director for Flagship Restaurant Group. I am here today with my assistant Jenn Brown and our graphic designer Haylie Rooosek Flagship Restaurant Group is an Omaha-based company. We have restaurants in Omaha - 4 of them right down the street - Fort Worth and Denver. We are growing rapidly with plans to open in many more markets. Our family of brands includes Blue Sushi Sake Grill, Roja Mexican Grill, Blatt Beer & Table and Plank Seafood Provisions. Has anyone ever eaten at any of our restaurants? Raise your hands. Fantastic, thank you for dining with us. Free food for you! Now raise your hands if you’ve never eaten at our restaurants. Cool, you get free food, too. Please come try us out. So thank you for coming to our presentation. I am here today to talk to you about Customer Loyalty. How to market to your current customers. At this point, you’ve accomplished the hard part. Your customer is in the door. They’ve given you a try. How you handle them next is so crucial. I am going to discuss simple strategies that we use to turn our guests into BRAND ADVOCATES.

A Brand Advocate is a fancy marketer’s term for loyal customer. But a brand advocate is even better than a loyal customer. Brand Advocates are so hooked on your brand, they make it a habit of spreading the good word however they can. Most of the time these days, those conversations are happening online. They get on Facebook to share awesome testimony, on Twitter, tweeting a photo of your product, or they’re on Yelp writing a good review for you.

And when they’re not talking about you online, they’re talking about you to their friends and family. In general conversation. Brand Advocates stay with you through thick and thin. They're loyal, highly satisfied customers who love your brand, and will influence potential customers.

These strategies for loyalty that I’m going to talk about, makes up most of our entire marketing strategy. Every day we focus on building personal relationships with our customers and taking care of our Brand Advocates. We accomplish a lot of this in the online atmosphere. But we also swear by the power of a hand-written note. A lot of the correspondence to customers leaves our office is the form of a thank you or apology written on nice custom stationery. ( that Jenn is holding up ).

There are 4 strategies I will discuss today:“Join the conversation”. In other words, talk with your customers, not at them. “Keep in Touch” Stay top-of-mind, don’t let your customer forget about you. “Win them Back” How to win back the business of a disgruntled customer. “Reward loyalty” Show your Brand Advocates that you appreciate them.

Our first strategy is JOIN THE CONVERSATIONThe topic pertains to the online conversation. There’s a lot of chatter to be found here. We spend a lot of our time engaging our customers, cultivating relationships online. This is your chance to humanize your brand, to give your logo a voice. And whether you sell tires or dining experiences like we do, I guarantee people are talking about your product or service here. Plenty of opportunities for you be present in the conversation. The main message I want highlight here, is BE PRESENT, and BE AVAILABLE, and HAVE A VOICE.

There are many online platforms where your business can have a voice. I’m going to touch on a just a few.

Facebook. This is where you'll find your older demographic. We use Facebook as a tool to communicate with our current customers. If they like our page, chances are it’s because they’ve already visited us.

How many people here operate a business Facebook account? So you probably already know this. Basic Facebook 101: The key to Facebook is to post relevant and engaging material that gets your followers attention. Don't just post your specials every day. That will only aggravate your followers, and they might hide you from their feed, or worse UNLIKE you!

Reply to guest inquires.Believe it or not, there are statistics out there that report that anywhere between 50-70 percent of customer inquiries through social media go unanswered. So please, reply to your customers.

Acknowledge positive feedback. Say thank you. Tell that customer you are delighted to hear their comments, and you plan to share their kind words with your entire team. Or in this case, we acknowledged her request to bring Blue down Olathe.

Reply to guest complaints

This is very important. Don’t simply delete the comment or block them from your page. Because blocking them from your Facebook page won’t keep them from raising hell other online public forums where you CANNOT simply delete and block them. Address it directly.

I’ll come back to guest complaints in a bit.

be the conversationPost content that speaks for itself and entices your customer. We posted this picture of maki with the simple caption “Get your sushi on.” This post generated 171 likes and 21 people shared it with their own Facebook friends.

In Fort Worth recently, we shared an amazing picture of a boat of sushi, it was engulfed by whispy smoke from the dry ice. It was a marvel, something of an art piece. The photo shows this beautiful spread of sushi and you could see people around the table with chopsticks approaching the spread. Our caption for that picture was "grab your chopsticks, we're going in". That one also generated a response. 107 likes, 13 shares. And Facebook reported that the engagement from those people generated 4,944 impressions on other people's new feeds.

So for this example of posted visuals of your product or service, the picture speaks for itself, it gets people talking about you, and makes them think about paying you a visit in the near future.

This one in Fort Worth captioned “Grab your chopsticks, we’re goin’ in.” Also generated a response. 107 likes, 13 shares. And Facebook reported that the engagement from those people generated 4,944 impressions.

So for this example of posted visuals of your product or service, the picture speaks for itself, it makes our guests hungry and thinking about paying us a visit soon.

This is a more recent example of a photo we posted on Monday. In addition to generation 118 likes, we noticed something new that our fans have been doing more and more lately. Using tags to communicate the photo to their friends. This sort of functions like Share.

This photo did not garner a lot of likes. But I think it’s still an important example of how use your beer to evoke emotion. “Grab a beer and put a smile on your face.” It seems a bit forward, but showing that smiling friendly girl might provoke someone to think about what makes them happy. If a beer does that, then so be it! This is an alternative to making a photo-less post that merely says “Join us today for happy hour! $1 off draft beers!” Completely different effect. We’ve been adding the human element to our photos more and more.

We’ve been adding the human element to our photos more and more. Get people thinking about what might make their day a little brighter after work.

Belly Up to the Bar this Weekend. Showing a romantic vision of our restaurant from the perspective of a guest sitting at the oyster bar lets the guest picture themselves sitting in that very place. It’s selling by subtle suggestion.

The next Platform we use to talk with our customers is Twitter.

Does anyone in this room have a personal Twitter account? How about a business Twitter account? There's a lot to be said about strategy on Twitter. the opportunities to connect with current and potentialcustomers are endless. But for the sake of this presentation, im going to just touch on twitter and show you how we use it to engage with customers that we already have.

This is where you’ll find the Millennials hanging out. The milenials represent a huge chunk of our demographic. We do a lot of work on Twitter.

On Twitter you should follow your followers back, listen and engage, build relationships and keep the content flowing!

My heart sinks a little when I see a company's Twitter account with hundreds, maybe thousands of followers, but they only follow a small handful of their followers. You should be following as many people as follow you, if not more.

So follow back... It makes people happy. And it shows your customers that you're listening.

Read tweets

We have keyword searches for each of our brands. For Blue we monitor keywords like sushi, happy hour. We have a huge social media dashboard that populates feeds of keyword searches for us. We monitor these closely. And then it,s appropriate, we enter the conversation.

For example, we saw this girl tweeting about how it's tradition for her and her dad to eat at blue when she comes back to omaha, we told her that we love that tradition. In response, she favorited our tweet (which is the equivalent of liking a comment on Facebbook) and retweeted us to her followers. And because she wasn't already a follower, she followed us. And of course... we followed her back.

This is a Dana.

She has happy hour at our OG blue location frequently with her friend Pam (known on twitter through her handle Pammy cakes) We noticed Dana tweeted about having lunch at another sushi place in town... One of our competitors. So we replied to that tweet with a little nudge, just to let her know we missed her. It worked, she visited that weekend for Happy Hour.

This response only worked because we know Dana through Twitter. We know she's a frequent customer. We've built a relationship with her through her frequent visits and tweets about our Happy Hour.

Through our listening (reading of tweets), Jenn caught an opportunity that she will share.

This is a Twitter interaction with Steve. Steve has been visiting us weekly at our Old Market Blue location since January 2010. He walks over from his downtown office every Friday for a sushi lunch special of Super Asparagus and Crunchy LA.

Because he checks in on Foursquare, I knew that this would be visit number 133.

Here’s Sushi Steve - I had lunch with him a few weeks back and met him for the first time in person.

We met one of our Twitter followers last year at the YP Summit, someone we engage frequently with. I think I hugged her.

We reached out to Natalia on Twitter after she wrote us an awesome Yelp review.

Through our keyword monitoring, we also discovered a conversation that was relevant to us. This guy was talking about his quest to quit smoking. He and his wife were putting the money that they would have spend on cigarettes aside. And when they hit their goal, they were going to use the money to get sushi. So after a little bit of research, we found this guy’s mailing address. And we mailed him an encouraging note, with a gift card.

Here he tweeted a photo of our card with the tweet “coolest surprise ever”.

It’s worth noting that in his earlier tweets about sushi, he had never mentioned blue. For all we know, they may have intended to get their reward sushi at another restaurant. Hopefully this experience converted them into Blue sushi eaters.

Keep the content flowing. You never know when it might provoke someone to take you up on your product or service.

The third way we communicate with guests online is on review sites. For us, this includes Yelp, Urbanspoon and Trip Advisor.

I'm going to touch on these briefly. If you have a public profile on any review site, you should claim it - claim them all. This will...1. Give you an opportunity to make sure all your information is accurate: business name, address, phone, hours, description of your business.2. get notifications of reviews so you don't have to manually comb the review sites every day.3. reply to reviews (develop consistent strategy) We have 9 locations. That means we have a public business profile on many different websites, for each of those 9 locations. That's a lot of reviews to keep track of. But we do it because it's important to our strategy.

How you handle reviews on a public forum says a lot about your brand, or your reputation, and it can make or break the a potential relationship with a customer. Our review strategy is simple.

Positive reviews, we love these. We acknowledge the review by thanking the reviewer. We don’t post these comments to the public. We post these in a private message. The comment I made to this reviewer is short and sweet. Simply, “ Hey Melissa! Thanks so much for your glowing review. We truly appreciate you taking time our of your day to leave such fantastic feedback. Cheers, Megan

(SWIPE response strategy: negative reviews)Always acknowledge these publicly. 1. Apologize for the experience in a short and sincere manner. Direct the conversation "offline" to a private format. That can be phone, email, or private messaging through the review site.

With negative reviews, your reputation is on the line. Potential customers WILL read through all of your negative reviews. The hope is that they will see that you addressed the review and did so in a polite and constructive matter. Hopefully they won't write you off just yet.

Taking time to respond to your reviewers, both negative and positive will show that your brand is present, available and has a voice. Help you build those relationships with your future Brand Advocates… one customer at a time. So to sum up Review Sites, keep your information updated and accurate, and acknowledge your reviews.

Our 2nd Strategy is to KEEP IN TOUCHWhen you get a customer in your door, or get them to purchase your product. Don't let them forget about you. Stay top of mind with your customers by sending them a gentle nudge once in a while to remind them that you’re still there.

We do this with a robust communications program. Your progam could be email, text or direct mail. But we use email. It’s cost effective and efficient. Internally, we call this our email autoresponder program

Upon receiving their check, within the black leather check presenter our guest gets a flashy card that looks like this. Can you read this? It says TEN DOLLARS OFF. That’s an attention grabber. If you subscribe to our email list, we promise to email you a Ten Dollar voucher every year for your birthday. This gets a lot of takers, believe me. Or believe Jenn. This offer hooks an average of 500 new email subscribers a week. All of which Jenn manually types and imports. So birthday promise has hooked them. Our guest is subscribed. What happens next is important. I know companies out there like to think customers want to hear from them daily. My inbox is proof of this. All that will do is annoy your customer, and lower the likelihood that they will actually read your email. We’ve set up an autoreponder program for each brand that is tailored to that subscriber. We set up all the emails in advance and once a subscriber is in our system, autopilot kicks in. They will begin to receive a series of emails based on the date they subscribed, in well-timed intervals. This system does all the work for you.

I will use Plank as an example. The first message our Plank subscribers receive is within an hour of being imported into our system. They receive an email thanking them for subscribing. And out of the gates we are offering an incentive to come back. We send out Plank subscribers an email good for 3 Free Oysters at their next visit.

A month later, they’ll get an general email informing them of our Lunch Specials. The message is short and simple, communicating one message: our lunch specials are offered Mon-Fri, 11 am-2 pm. And it offers a link to our lunch menu.

At 2 months we tell our guest about our Happy Hours. The days of the week, the hours they are offered, and a link to view our complete menu onlime. And within that email, we’re offering free oysters at their next happy hour visit. And if raw oysters aren't their thing, our guest also has an option to get our wood-fire grilled BBQ oysters

And on their birthday, we make good on our promise for $10 off. The branding changes on this email because this offer is good at any of our restaurants: Blue, Roja, Blatt or Plank.

This program continues: communicating everything we think guests should know about our restaurants, one message at a time. We know guests dine at other places. We know they don’t want to receive an email each week. That promise of $10 off and a few other offers sprinkled in are incentives to keep our guest subscribed.

And because we aren’t constantly bombarding our guests, and instead sending them timely and informative reminders, our open rate average is 30 percent and our unsubscribes are very low. The email program we use is called MailChimp. But many email programs out there offer a similar autoresponder tool. This entire program is very affordable. This entire email system, which allows us to send as many emails as we want to our subscriber list of nearly 30,000 (and growing) is $240 per month.

The end goal with your Communication strategy is to stay in contact with your customer. Keep your messages simple, and time them responsibly.

Our 3rd strategy to retain customer loyalty is WIN THEM BACKWe serve more than 20,000 guests per week. We’re going to make mistakes. It’s how we handle those mistakes that will determine if a customer sticks with us or moves on.

If handled correctly, this moment could successfully convert a customer on the fence into a brand advocate. Handling these properly will also affect your company's reputation in a good way

We've touched on this briefly. When a customer leaves negative feedback on a public forum, Acknowledge it with a brief apology. and then move that conversation to a private chat. This is not the place to explain yourself or get defensive. Here are some examples where we’re done that.(read this one)

That link leads them to a contact form on our website...

Another twitter conversation. Through our keyword searches, I discovered this woman was talking about us. I read through some of her tweets and discovered she had been in over the weekend. It was obvious we made some mistakes, but it wasn’t clear if management had resolved the issue for her before she left the restaurant. So I followed up and ended up directing her to an online comment card, hopefully sending the conversation offline for good.

On Yelp

This is a clip of the top of our online comment card. Here a guest has an opportunity to tell us as much as they want about their visit. We can gather all the important information that we need to make internal changes to correct our shortcomings. When the guest sends this card, it goes direct to the general manager of that location, and our director of operations, who oversees all 9 of our restaurants.

Seek as much information as you can gather. Use it as a teachable moment for your business to learn from mistakes. Thank your customer for the opportunity to improve. And Invite them back. Give them an incentive to give you another try. Jenn is well-versed in apologizing to our guests. She writes a hand-written note to a guest at least once a day on our fancy stationery. Enclosed in that correspondence is the note, a gift card and her business card so the guest has someone to contact.

Follow-up with that guest.

For us, this is usually a step that seals the deal for our customers. Sure a company can send you a letter with a few freebies. But how many actually follow-up after your return visit. Jenn keeps track of all those gift card numbers. And each week, we check our list of “winback gift cards” to see who redeemed one. And she will see if that guest returned. She can even pull up the entire ticket from their visit, learning who their server was, where they sat, and what they ordered. This makes follow-up easy. She will then reach out to the guest to inquire about their visit. "Hey Guest, we sW that you returned to Blue this weekend. Thanks so much for giving us another try. Saw that you ordered the Itchy Salmon, my fav, what'd you think? did you have better service this time? we'd love your feedback. if you have an opportunity, please shoot us a note.

And then we hold our breath and wait for their reply. I actually don’t recall an example of when a guest said they had a 2nd miserable experience. Do you Jenn? This program wins hearts. Sometimes, guests will even update their negative reviews into a positive one. We get comments from people about how impressed they are that we cared to reach out, or even bothered to reply.

This tweet... Explain lettuce cups.

This guest tweeted her approval of our customer service outreach

Read the slide.

Read the slide.

The responses that we get make our days. We have our own little celebration in our office. This is what makes me love my job

The final strategy i want to talk about is rewarding loyalty. Reward your loyal brand advocates. Some of you might have a frequent guest program. We’ve found alternative ways to engage with and satisfy our regulars. Be it through our email program with a carefully timed schedule of information and incentives, or keeping tabs on and rewarding our online engagers. It's not perfect, but these are examples of personalized and grass roots approaches to rewarding our advocates. Here are a few ways we do that.

At our Blue location in Denver we found ourselves engaging frequently on Twitter with Joey, who would tweet us at every visit, and tweet nice feedback to his followers. So, we sent him a gift card, thanking him for his loyalty and thanking him for spreading the good word. This guy is the true definition of a Brand Advocate. Here’s a tweet from him, showing our thank you note and declaring us his favorite new sushi and happy hour place in Denver.

Another twitter loyalist

This is Kathy. Kathy is a regular at our OG Blue location on 144th/Maple. She visited us two days in a row one week - first at OG, then at Old Market Blue. We told her that she’s one of our favorites.

And then we mailed her a little thank you note with a gift card. It was easy to find a mailing address for her - we just sent it to her work address.

We do offer check-in specials on Foursquare. At Blue it’s a free Starter every 5th check-in.

On their 1-year anniversary of being an email subscriber, we celebrate by sending our guest a email for free food. If after being subjected to a year’s worth of email communciations from us, we’re assuming they’re still customers and we want to thank them for their loyalty. For Blue, our offer is a free Starter.

A free Appetizer at Roja

A free Snack at Blatt. And I don’t have one setup yet for Plank - we are just a few months old. But I’ll definitely get to this soon.

On Review Sites, sometimes the reviews are sooo good and the reviewer demonstrates that they are a loyal and consistent customer, I will offer to send them a gift card to thank them for their loyalty.

To recap what we’ve discussed. 1. Join the ConversationBE PRESENT, and BE AVAILABLE, and HAVE A VOICE. 2. Keep in touchGive your customer gentle reminders here and there that you still exist, and your product is still awesome. 3. Win Them BackTake responsibility for your mistakes, and take steps to make it right for your customer. 4. Reward LoyaltyTake care of your loyal Brand Advocates. They’ll take care of you.

That's all I have!

Does anyone have any questions for us?

Thank you for being here. We've brought $10 gift cards for everyone