Groucho’s Deli, an elevated deli concept with 29 locations across the Southeast U.S., is a brand with a rich history going back more than 80 years. It’s known for its top-quality sandwiches and salads, as well as its commitment to its customers and their local communities.
Groucho’s Deli also prides itself on being a tech-forward brand—it doesn’t hesitate to explore new technologies with the potential to improve service even more. That includes the creation of a comprehensive in-house local store marketing program that coordinates everything from “Gives Back Nights” for local community groups to email campaigns, custom social media posts, and reputation management.
The program, called Colonel Miller Marketing in honor of the brand’s founder Harold “Groucho” Miller, helps franchisees execute their marketing strategy with confidence on behalf of Groucho’s. It’s achieved phenomenal results so far—after five months, stores using this program have a roughly 20 percent higher AUV than stores who don’t. Studying guest data and crafting hyper-specific marketing campaigns have played a major role in that increase—and have helped Groucho’s reach an enterprise-wide habitual guest rate of 38 percent. (Habitual guests are unique guests who have shown a consistent ordering habit, whether it’s quarterly, monthly, weekly, or daily.)
Deric Rosenbaum, president of Groucho’s Deli, attributes a significant piece of the brand’s increased relevance to its partnership with Bikky, a customer data platform built exclusively for the restaurant industry.
Bikky brings together data from a variety of systems—including point-of-sale software, loyalty apps, gift cards, and online ordering platforms—into a single searchable source. “We wanted to gain a better understanding of our guests and their behaviors at both the enterprise level and the store level,” Rosenbaum says. “This included understanding behavior, like what’s driving guest acquisition, retention, frequency, and churn, to better enable marketing and our operations teams to make data-driven decisions that ultimately increase revenue and customer loyalty across the entire footprint.”
Groucho’s began testing Bikky’s capabilities in December 2020, and rolled it out to the entire brand in October 2021. With Bikky, Groucho’s has been able to fine-tune its email automation and reputation management to help franchisees engage their customers one-on-one—at scale.
Brands need to thoroughly understand their customers and what makes them tick, but no customer base is a monolith. Bikky’s tools for location-specific segmentation and automation have allowed Groucho’s to build customer-centric messaging around loyalty, locations, menus, and timelines by grouping specific customers into email segments. Groucho’s has also created location-specific e-blasts with extremely targeted messaging. “Bikky’s influence helped us take our overall email open rate from 19 percent, which is about the industry standard, to well over 30 percent,” Rosenbaum says. “And with our location-specific emails, we’re seeing an open rate north of 40 percent.”
Data insights from Bikky also help Groucho’s quickly identify guest profiles for reputation management or service recovery—helping to salvage brand relationships and ultimately outcomes. “Bikky consistently provides us with a better understanding of our guests who love us the most and how they respond to our quality and service,” Rosenbaum says.
Groucho’s also uses Bikky to benchmark franchise locations versus cohorts, looking at order latency, retention, and guest habits. It cross-references those data sets to identify lower-performing units and recommend opportunities for adjustments.
“There are other factors at play, but we couldn’t achieve the great results we’re seeing without segmentation,” Rosenbaum says. “If you want to compete in today’s operating environment, you have to have tools like Bikky to take the data and help you understand how guests respond to your efforts. Bikky delivers the data in a meaningful and actionable way for us, and that’s why I consider Bikky to be a key part of our tech stack.”
To learn more about what Bikky can do for restaurants, visit its website.
By Kara Phelps
