December 2023MARTECHOUTLOOK.COM8IN MY OPI N IONBarely a year ago I had no idea what CDPs or data warehouses were. Now, we're on the cusp of them becoming integral business tools and the foundation of our MarTech stack. So what changed and why is this now what our fast casual restaurant chain is going to leverage all the way to a 5 percent lift in transactions in 2023?Prior to 2020, almost all of our customers were dine-in and system-wide we ran 10-15 percent of revenue from catering. We THE JOURNEY OF BUILDING A MARTECH STACKBy Julie Wade, Senior Director Of Marketing, Taziki's Mediterranean Caféknew who our customers were because we saw them, sometimes daily. Then the pandemic changed everything.Our app (which we had but had been adopted sparingly) and third-party delivery platforms jumped into prominence out of necessity and our data became siloed-- in-store POS, third party platforms, our app / online ordering system and catering. There was no comprehensive system that could market to all of our customer groups, or even just a few at the same time.At the same time the Marketing Department was having this journey of frustration, our data analytics team was also getting to a breaking point because none of the reporting we needed to run our business was normalized and streamlined. That led us all down the path to a CDP and data warehouse.Simultaneously, we had outgrown our POS which housed our loyalty, email marketing and gift card programs and were actively hunting for a replacement. Knowing a new POS would most likely not contain all of those marketing functions, I started the process of investigating replacements.The key factor when talking to loyalty and messaging vendors was the ability to integrate with our data. Who was going to be able to get data out of our POS (whichever one we chose), our app / olo system (which was not going to change) and our advanced ordering (catering) system? Initially, we thought Salesforce was going to be that solution, but the integration was too steep of a climb. To build the system we needed, it would have been hours and hours and thousands and thousands of dollars of development work to get it stood up.While I was moving in one direction with sourcing new vendors, our tech team was also sourcing CDPs so a marketing platform would Julie Wade
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