Case Study: El Gallo Giro’s Targeted Marketing Solution

El Gallo Giro

El Gallo Giro is a popular restaurant chain offering authentic, freshly prepared Mexican dishes. Since its opening in 1988, it has expanded to 11 locations throughout California. Its unique business model combines a fresh tortilla stand, juice bar and bakery with its kitchen preparing its signature carnitas meats prepared in the traditional Michoacan style.

Challenges

As a restaurant chain, El Gallo Giro recognized that competition is everywhere. With so many businesses offering similar dishes and similar prices, small differences can mean the difference between success and failure.

“El Gallo Giro is known throughout California for our freshly prepared tortillas and uniquely authentic dishes,” said marketing director Alex Bernal, “But we recognized that to increase our success, we needed to refine our marketing strategy.”

As El Gallo Giro evaluated their current marketing plan, they set several goals. First and foremost was to increase customer frequency through targeted marketing, because it’s easier to market to current customers than to non-customers. They also wanted to increase their revenue from transactions that were already taking place. To do this, they decided to find a way to upsell customers as well as cross-market the bakery and juice bar with transactions in the main restaurant.

In the search for improved marketing, help came from their new CFO, who had recently been hired from another restaurant chain. He brought with him experience using a new marketing tool—SmartReceipt, which had several key elements El Gallo Giro was looking for to meet their marketing goals.

Solution

El Gallo Giro began to examine SmartReceipt’s product offerings, as well as an email marketing company. SmartReceipt uses point-of-sale messaging to drive sales, where the competing company uses customer information to send targeted emails. As they compared features, it became clear that SmartReceipt offered the most features for the price and was the best solution to meet their immediate needs.

“The El Gallo Giro marketing team chose to implement the SmartReceipt Pro product because of the impressive feature set it offered,” Alex said. “We knew it would let us use our existing receipt system to create targeted marketing materials for customers, and we knew it would be easy to install and operate the system. It would also provide us with the advanced analytics to track our results and refine our messaging.”

They implemented the SmartReceipt system with no problems, and because no new hardware is required, El Gallo Giro was able to download and install the system remotely. This saved a lot of time and expense, because there was no need to bring SmartReceipt personnel to their locations. Once the installation was completed, the SmartReceipt staff helped them create their first receipts to orient them to the software.

El Gallo Giro uses the dynamic coupon features of the SmartReceipt system to create several different kinds of coupons, including simple discounts and buy one/get one promotions. They also print coupons centered around holidays important to the Hispanic community, which have been very successful.

Results

The SmartReceipt system has performed beyond expectations. El Gallo Giro has found that their customers are responding very favorably to the SmartReceipt system. The coupons that are set with an expiration date of 7 days or less are especially effective. Redemption rates average between 4 and 6 percent, with the industry standard for coupon redemption approximately 1 percent. Week-to-week sales have increased by approximately 2 percent, which management attributes to the SmartReceipt system.

The SmartReceipt system has also laid the foundation for the future direction of their marketing. In addition to the promotions they are running, they plan to use the receipt system to conduct a survey which will give them access to consumer emails and allow them to initiate an email marketing campaign.

“I would recommend SmartReceipt Marketing for any restaurant,” Alex Bernal said. “Having the SmartReceipt system in your store is as important as having a printer.”

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El Gallo Giro’s Dynamic Coupons with SmartReceipt

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