NEWTON, MA--(Marketwired - Aug 12, 2014) - Paytronix Systems, Inc., a leading provider of reward program solutions to restaurants and retailers, today announced that Shari's Café & Pies, an Oregon-based chain of 24-hour family restaurants, has launched its new rewards program on the POS-integrated Paytronix Rewards Platform. With its smartphone apps, mobile-friendly guest web pages, and an unmatched promotion and messaging engine, Paytronix enables Shari's to engage its guests through their mobile devices -- compelling them to visit more frequently.
Shari's is the largest family-style chain in the Pacific Northwest, with nearly 100 locations and more than 4,000 employees. Shari's new Paytronix-powered Café Club Rewards program helps the chain better understand its loyal guests and then create relevant promotions that are designed to drive profitable visits based on the guests' interactions with the brand.
Before this new loyalty program, Shari's Honored Guest program relied heavily on printed coupons to drive visits and spending in its stores. Shari's realized that the percent of profitable visits occurring from the focus upon loyal guests was expanding fast, while the printed coupons and Free Standing Inserts (FSIs) had minimal benefit.
"We were producing a large number of unprofitable checks with our old method of discounting through coupons and FSIs. With our new loyalty program, we can leverage the data to show appreciation to our best guests, while using the program's levers to incent visits during new day parts, drive guests to experience new menu items and more. The Paytronix program allows us to enhance our guest engagement -- to interact with our guests based on their purchase habits," said Kevin Bechtel, senior vice president of purchasing and menu development for Shari's Café & Pies. "We're shifting our loyalty and marketing spend because there's a real cost to issuing more than a million coupons with minimal return. By engaging our more profitable loyal guests, we're able to match the incentive to the value of the customer."
The new Café Club Rewards program delivers a simple value proposition that is designed to appeal more broadly to all of Shari's guests while still delivering value to its existing Honored Guest members. By offering the easiest, most diverse methods for enrollment in-store, online, and via mobile apps, Shari's attracted more than 50,000 members in the first month of the new program's launch. Its goal was to quickly establish the critical mass necessary to harness the full value of the guest data.
Shari's also engaged the Paytronix Data Insights team to help understand its guests, and to act upon opportunities identified from the new loyalty program's data sources. The Paytronix Data Insights team's loyalty marketing experts leverage industry-leading data analytics to uncover guest behavior patterns that lead to the identification of high-impact business marketing opportunities that are not apparent when viewing day-to-day sales data.
"The restaurants that do the best with a loyalty program rollout are those who set clear goals at the chain, franchisee, and store level, and where the entire organization from the CEO down to the store manager and wait staff are excited about the program and are held accountable for results," said Lee Barnes, head of Data Insights, Paytronix Systems, Inc. "We help our clients from the initial enrollment phase of loyalty, to quickly gain a better understanding of guests. Our work has uncovered actionable insights that truly compel visits and spending. Our team has provided a clear path to loyalty marketing promotions that are already impacting Shari's bottom line, while creating more loyal and profitable guests."
"While we've always had a robust rewards program with our Honored Citizens, we're very pleased with our increased engagement with a younger demographic," said Carrie Henderson, Shari's Marketing Manager. "Paytronix enables Shari's Café & Pies to be more strategic with its rewards, driving the behavior that we want to see from our guests by also giving them something of value to thank them for their business."
"Ultimately, we want our loyal, every Saturday morning breakfast guest to come back to Shari's during the week and try one of our burgers for lunch," said Bechtel.
Learn more about how Shari's is getting smarter about incenting and rewarding its guests -- read the Q&A with Kevin Bechtel at Paytronix' blog at:
http://blog.paytronix.com/an-interview-with-kevin-bechtel-of-sharis-cafe-and-pies
Follow Paytronix on Twitter @Paytronix
About Paytronix Systems, Inc.
Paytronix's proprietary guest engagement platform helps more than 250 restaurant and retail chains manage and grow more than $10 Billion in guest spend. Customers benefit from big data consumer insights that Paytronix generates from 1-to-1 engagement with more than 20 million loyal guests -- through mobile, social and today's most innovative digital marketing tools. As a result, customers can more effectively segment and motivate their guests to increase spend and drive revenue. For more information, visit www.paytronix.com.
About Shari's Café & Pies
Shari's is the largest full-service restaurant chain based in the Pacific Northwest. Founded in 1978 and operated by Shari's Management Corporation of Beaverton, Oregon, Shari's restaurants are designed to provide high quality, reasonably-priced meals 24 -hours a day in comfortable surroundings. Shari's menu features a full selection of breakfasts, salads, sandwiches, hamburgers, dinner entrees, desserts and a large selection of specialty pies. With over 4,000 employees, the chain currently has 98 locations throughout Oregon, Washington, California, Idaho, Nebraska and Wyoming.