Ask any club manager and chances are they’ll tell you that a good chicken schnitzel does wonders for getting people through the doors.
In my conversations with clubs, I’ve learned that the humble chicken schnitzel outsells just about every other item on a club’s menu, and that people are willing to travel in search of the best deal.
Club managers know that chicken schnitzel promotions, like two-for-one deals or a Tuesday $7 schnitzel special, are worth running. But when it comes to measuring the success of a promotion, they often don’t have much data to work with.
Since clubs usually hardcode promotions into point of sale or marketing systems, it is difficult to collect granular data or draw on information from other data sources. They can’t slice and dice data in different ways, which limits their ability to analyse promotions in-depth.
A club might be able to see how many schnitzels were sold, and how much the promotion cost the business, but that’s about it. They won’t know whether a chicken schnitzel promotion causes a spike in visits, how it affects gaming revenue or whether members are spending more time in the club as a result of the special.
What many clubs don’t realise is that with the right analytics, a simple chicken schnitzel promotion can reveal valuable insights about their performance and member behaviour. Here’s how.
It’s not just about chicken schnitzel sales
There’s more to running a successful promotion than counting chicken schnitzel sales. To truly understand a promotion’s effectiveness, clubs need to be able to see what’s happening in the restaurant during the promotion (i.e. between 7pm and 10pm on a Friday), as well as how the promotion affects spending in other parts of the club, both before and after the promotion has ended.
For example, if a friend and I went to our local club for their two-for-one schnitzel deal, we wouldn’t just come for dinner. We might arrive early and order two beers, and then try our luck on the poker machines after dinner. In my experience, most clubs wouldn’t be able to connect this behaviour, and added revenue, to the chicken schnitzel special. They lack the analytics tools to do so. When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of promotions and marketing campaigns, I believe that every club should be able to do two things:
- Compare performance between periods to determine a promotion’s success
Clubs should be able to benchmark their performance against previous periods. Are member attendance, average member spend and gaming machine revenue higher in weeks that the two-for-one chicken schnitzel special runs? This requires drawing on data from multiple sources and analysing it over time.
- Identify return on investment across the entire club
Are you confident that a two-for-one chicken schnitzel deal has a greater impact on overall revenue than a $5 burger and chips special? Every club should be able to test promotions against each other to identify those that work best.
At the same time, clubs must understand how promotions affect member attendance (i.e. do the promotions pull people in from the street or off the gaming floor?) and overall club revenue (i.e. are members just coming in for meals, or are they staying around to play the gaming machines too?). This means analysing more than chicken schnitzel sales. Clubs must be able to track members as they move throughout the club, even when the promotion is over. The good news is that most clubs already collect this information. It’s just a matter of implementing a club-specific analytics tool to help slice and dice that data in useful ways.
ClubIntel is Professional Advantage’s own business analytics tool for clubs. It makes it easy to see what’s really going on with your data, and helps clubs across Australia craft more effective promotions that support member loyalty and revenue growth. Read more about ClubIntel.
