How We Helped OpenTable.com Build Loyalty and Bring More Personalized Restaurant Recommendations to their Customers

OpenTable is an online restaurant-reservation service. It has two audiences to communicate with in their email marketing programs. First, they have many email promotions they make to restaurant owners who they partner with for taking customer reservations. This email program is managed using Marketo marketing automation. We helped OpenTable clean up data and reporting in Marketo, and we re-designed the email and landing page templates to be easier for marketing managers to use and to be compatible with mobile responsive design.

Secondly the other email audience is the customers who book restaurant reservations through the OpenTable platform. Our first task was to help revise the strategy and the launch of a new rewards program. We did the copy writing and design on an on-boarding and retention series. We then managed the weekly email programs executed through Silverpop.

We then turned our attention to the highly complex weekly email programs that make restaurant recommendations by region and type to customers. These programs are crucial to driving traffic to new restaurants that were being supported through OpenTable and also to driving restaurant reservations daily across the country. This email program was very complex and manual and required several email and data managers to execute every week. We knew there was a better way, and we worked extensively to integrate a new email sending platform, ExactTarget, to create new dynamic content email templates that simplified the data matching and delivered much more personalized offers to customers. The templates also made the marketing manager’s jobs much easier.

Lastly, since the marketing calendar accelerated with new offers and technology to implement, we provided in-house and outsourced staffing to help execute the 20 various email programs each week, and to issue custom reporting dashboards. In the end, our goal was to help OpenTable have more satisfied and loyal customers, and that was achieved and measured by rapid growth in new customers who increased their monthly average reservations because of the email marketing efforts.

Are you losing potential customers and ROI because your email marketing programs aren’t optimized? Let us develop and implement a winning strategy for you. Call and talk with Beasley’s optimization experts today.