According to MediaPost.com, “Building customer loyalty and lifetime value through cross-channel, one-to-one marketing is the marketer’s equivalent of the Holy Grail. This is certainly true for restaurant brands, given the need for every competitive advantage in winning share of consumers’ scaled-back eating-out budgets.”

“But achieving one-to-one marketing cost-effectively can sometimes seem as elusive as finding the legendary Grail. Papa Gino’s, Inc., the privately owned parent of the eponymous pizza chain and the D’Angelo Grilled Sandwiches chain — which together have more than 370 locations, primarily in the Northeast — set about its own one-to-one quest late last year, in conjunction with launching a new loyalty rewards program and investing in new technology. The company had data for hundreds of thousands of customers, including opt-in emails collected via its existing online rewards and ordering systems — and replacing an outdated physical punch-card system with a magnetic-strip swipe cards for in-restaurant rewards redemptions added the ability to capture customer data for those transactions, as well. However, targeting and tailored messaging capabilities were lacking. “We’d been sending email blasts, but on a broad, generic basis,” says Michael McManama, SVP brand development for Papa Gino’s, Inc.”