Paramount Restaurants
Viral marketing and online voucher integration
In an increasingly competitive market, how do you get your customers attention? How do you increase mailing lists? Are you able to make your marketing budget go further by creating a viral marketing campaign?
These are just some of the challenges faced by Ryan Badger, Online Marketing Manager at Paramount Restaurants Ltd, explains how Paramount Restaurants have built both a simple and incredibly successful online marketing strategy combining viral marketing and online vouchers.
Six brands, one objective: driving sales
Paramount is a privately-owned company that operates a stable of restaurant brands, mostly in the London area. The company owns six brand that are split into two categories, the up-market ‘Paramount London’ and high-street ‘Paramount High Street.’ The restaurant portfolio caters to a diverse range of clientele; therefore, marketing has two very unique markets to target.
Ryan explains: “The difference in strategy between our High Street and London brands is necessary, due to the varied customer experience you can expect from each. However bottom line, the underlying objective is the same, driving sales.”
So Paramount tailor their promotional offerings with gourmet club cards and VIP member’s events which are targeted at our up-market brands, whilst Paramount High Street promotion is more discount voucher orientated.
Vouchers and email marketing: a winning combination
Paramount had been primarily using the PureResponse email marketing software to promote their voucher offers, such as ‘15% off,’ ‘Two for one,’ or ‘Free bottle of wine with each meal’. In recent years, discount vouchers have seen a notable increase in distribution and use making getting their vouchers to customers before they receive competing ones vital.
Paramount restaurants are getting great returns from their email marketing. A recent campaign was sent to a mailing list of 79,000 customers achieved a 30% open rate, with a further 45% click through which result in an awesome 10,000 vouchers being downloaded.
For Ryan, email marketing is key. “We’ve been looking to exploit the current demand for offers and promotions to build a clean, indepth database which will ensure a future online audience that is sustainable, without the demand for further paid advertising. Email marketing is the perfect solution.”
Get viral and grow a database at no extra cost
Over recent years Paramount Restaurants have gathered an extensive customer database, which has been significantly increased in size since they began running online voucher campaigns. Paramount has a mailing list of over 200,000 and it’s growing all the time.
Pure360 has helped Paramount in its quest to boost its mailing list. The ‘send to a friend’ feature allows their mailing list to forward the promotional email to a friend or colleague at the click of a mouse, but here’s the clever bit; in order for the friend to receive their voucher they must sign up with their email address online. Bingo, another name on the mailing list.
To maximise the return of this growing client database, Paramount decided to launch their own newsletters. These are six very different brands so each newsletter needed to be tailored accordingly. Thanks to the templates in PureResponse Paramount can produce one newsletter per brand, per month, tailoring each to the specific restaurant’s brand guidelines.
Phenomenal ROI result
Understandably Ryan couldn’t be happier with the results he has seen as a result of Paramount’s email marketing campaigns. There was an increase in traffic to their websites of 125% across the Paramount brands (against the previous month) after email marketing was implemented. Online bookings saw an increase of a massive 150% (against previous 6 month trend). Paramount is in no doubt that these results have been heavily influenced by their email marketing campaigns.
“Pure360 has given us the freedom to take control of our customer relations. The cost effective service has enabled us to shorten turnaround times for email campaigns and manage the way that we capture data via the sign up form function. Our account manager is always at the end of the phone, consistently going out of his way to ensure we are happy and satisfied with the service.”
But what about ROI? Well the result of Paramount’s first email campaign speaks for itself; the total cost of the service for a year (including credits), was covered with the delivery of the first campaign and the results it achieved. We’ll drink to that.
