Marketing: Melting Pot’s Club Fondue E-Mail Database
How to Build a Bigger Customer Database ... And Get a Whole Lot More Back.
By Allison Perlik, Senior Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, July 10, 2007
 168 The Melting Pot’s rank in R&I’s 2007 Top 400 Chains, up four slots from #172 on 2006.  13.7% Increase in The Melting Pot’s total food-and-beverage sales (to $185.3 million) in 2006 over the previous year, according to R&I’s 2007 Top 400 Chains ranking. The chain’s unit count rose 12%. |
Customers’ e-mail addresses are as good as gold in today’s digital marketing age, and fondue chain The Melting Pot has hit the jackpot. The Tampa, Fla.-based brand’s “Club Fondue” e-mail database boasts more than 500,000 names; since the program’s inception two years ago, both restaurant guest counts and sales have increased.
The secret to building such a rich marketing resource is in offering customers real value for signing up, says Kendra Sartor, vice president of brand development at The Melting Pot. Club Fondue members earn a free chocolate fondue dessert when they join and another annually on their birthdays. Additionally, they receive advance notice of special events and are allowed to make reservations before non-members for special occasions such as Valentine’s Day, when tables are a hot ticket.
Beyond boosting guest loyalty and repeat visits, having the comprehensive diner database creates an even greater opportunity for The Melting Pot: the chance to get direct feedback from its best customers and use their input to craft a better, more consumer-focused brand. That was the idea last May, when the chain launched what it hopes will become an annual e-mail survey to find out how customers use and perceive the restaurants. The project garnered an impressive 28% response rate--thanks to an offer for a free chocolate fondue--which was enough to drive some key changes in the company’s business strategy.
“It really helped us define what the guest wants. We don’t own this brand; our customers own this brand,” Sartor says. “If my marketing strategy is about what the CEO or the president or I want, we’re doomed. It has to be about responding to the guest.”
One of The Melting Pot’s biggest responses to the input has been in its advertising approach. The survey revealed that, instead of the celebratory events such as birthdays and anniversaries that executives had assumed drove restaurant usage, most visits were for no special occasion. The company immediately shifted the focus of customer communications, playing up the sense of fun and the unique experience of fondue-style dining that customers’ survey responses indicated they most enjoyed about the restaurants.
The 14-question survey also uncovered useful demographic information (age, gender, income, marital status) about The Melting Pot’s best customers. Learning that 25- to 45-year-old females were most heavily represented in Club Fondue, for example, helped the company find more-effective, targeted ways to spend national and local advertising dollars, and led the marketing staff to explore venues that could better reach this younger, technically savvy group, such as the Internet and other nontraditional vehicles. The restaurants also updated menu designs, shifting from a simple black-and-white format to a more-interactive, four-color layout that offers greater detail about food items and the dining experience.
Meanwhile, input about how far diners typically travel to dine at The Melting Pot is helping the company assess the ideal distance between units for new locations. On the local level, since Club Fondue tracks which location members visit most, operators can send messages tailored to their own markets, promoting special events such as wine dinners or charity events.
“One of the things we were most shocked by was that this user was coming in as much as they were--2.7 times per year compared to 1.7 times for the general population,” Sartor says. “So the most exciting thing for us was realizing how many people were so passionate about the brand. They are ready to hear from us.”
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