Mike & Patty's and four other Texas cafés and restaurants had busy rushes and empty tables in between. To fill the quiet hours, they emailed discount codes to their customer list.
Then nothing. Nobody could say which customer used which code, how many times a code was redeemed, or whether it brought anyone in during an off-peak hour. The campaign might have worked. There was no way to know.
- Venues on one system
- 5 setups→1
Tie the code to a person
I rebuilt all five sites on Square and wired in the POS and order management, so the venues ran on one system instead of five different setups.
- Square runs the site, the menu, the orders and the POS.
- Mailchimp sends the codes, timed for the hours each venue wants to fill, not the hours it is already busy.
- A tracking system in Python sits underneath both, so every redemption lands against a customer account and a code.
A discount you cannot trace is a guess with a price tag.
What changed
Each venue can now see which code was used, by whom, and how often. A quiet-hour campaign can be judged instead of guessed at, and regulars get rewarded for coming back. Baked Tea got the same rollout when it joined the group.