How QSR Brand Noodles & Company Built Its Loyalty Program

If a business is looking for growth, it helps to define that term before chasing it. Do you want a whole lot of new customers who’ll drive traffic and head count, but may only buy your product once? Or do you simply want people who know and love your products to feel comfortable buying more of them? If it’s the latter, it helps to know those people, their home territory, their habits and their wants—even if it’s as simple as an occasional plate of chicken parmesan. In 2016, Seattle-based data platform Amperity developed a system that absorbed any kind of data at any scale and ran models that provided a complete profile of a customer. Amperity’s partners at Major League Soccer’s Seattle Sounders used that information to personalize emails and links and increase season ticket sales. Brooks Running used Amperity’s technology to reach its community of athletes more directly, more than double engagement on social media and email, and increase its return on ad spending by nearly 130%. Amperity’s work with Alaska Airlines used targeted pre-flight emails to nearly get 61% more customers to open those messages, 22.5% more to click enclosed links, and nearly triple loyalty program sign-ups while cutting online ad spending by 30%. HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar Marries B2B Technology With TikTok and NFL Sunday Ticket That approach to growth has helped Amperity develop a client base that includes Wyndham, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Patagonia, and, as of this year, Authentic Brands (Brooks Brothers, Forever 21, Reebok, Shaquille O’Neal and others). It also caught the attention of Colorado-based fast-casual dining chain Noodles & Company, which was having its own struggles with growing a loyal customer base. Noodles & Company has 475 locations in 31 states, but realized only about 18 months ago that its data on customer spending and preferences lived in completely different places. That’s when its marketers began looking for help. “We were really struggling to understand the immersion and the behaviors of our guests without being able to bring it together,” said Stacey Pool, chief marketing officer at Noodles & Company. “Our tools that we had in place were just too disconnected to be able to be effective in how we go to market.” Amperity illustrating the link between customer data and revenue. Noodles & Company marketers were looking for partners who’d allow them to pull customer data themselves, implement it in their existing marketing software and begin “advancing the product”—improve the chain’s loyalty program to predict what existing customers want and use that information to eventually target new customers with personalized ads. Amperity met all of those criteria for Noodles & Company. The two have been working together for only a couple of months, but they’re already seeing success based on simple tweaks. When marketers have access to deep piles of organized data and know their customer’s needs, growth in sales among existing fans can eventually lead to growth in headcount among like-minded converts. “It's so expensive to waste marketing dollars,” said Megan McDonagh, CMO of Amperity. “By understanding how your customers behave, and which ones you should target, you're being much more cost effective and efficient.” Building a better customer Before Amperity, Noodles & Company had a homegrown “customer warehouse” of data where much of the information being stockpiled wasn’t mingling. The chain knew what loyalty tiers customers were in, but had to manually dig into how frequently they were making purchases or how much they’d bought over a lifetime. Extracting just those facts could take weeks. But it wanted to know more: What proteins they were putting on their pasta, what channels they were using to see Noodles & Company ads and offers. Most importantly, they wanted to see how rewards and points drove visits to restaurants so they could personalize messages instead of simply offering broad discounts. With restaurant margins fairly tight, it was important for the marketing team to have access to that information while reducing pressure on prices. Southwest Airlines and Grammarly Turn B-to-C Strengths Into B-to-B Success “Not every loyalty member is created equal,” McDonagh said. “Some people may sign up once and only eat once because they get a discount and some people want all the points so they can keep coming back.” Noodles & Company made significant investments in technology before Covid-19 hit—using Salesforce for its marketing and Mastercard’s Session M for its loyalty program—but tying it all together has taught the company some lessons about the post-pandemic customer. For example, Pool noted that the entire restaurant industry pulled back on catering during the pandemic, but rushed back in afterward. By combining and sifting through its data, Noodles & Company can determine who’s buying catering, the size of their typical check, their typical order and how best to target their business. That’s led to incremental gains for its catering business and additional restaurant business. “This tool continues to be, in the short term and longer term, a very important part of getting more targeted in who we are going to with these offers,” Pool said. “We can start to use this in terms of location picking, or understanding food a little bit more clearly…if somebody is going to pick a chicken parm versus a mac and cheese, we'll definitely use that in 2024.” The chicken parm hypothesis Though Noodles & Company’s partnership with Amperity is still in its infancy, it’s already taking a bit of guesswork out of individual marketing. The chain just introduced its chicken parmesan dish a little more than a month ago. Before the launch, Noodles & Company marketers went into Amperity and pulled out data for four different segments that the surmised might buy the dish if targeted, based on their past behavior. For example, the marketers hypothesized that customers who’d previously added parmesan-crusted chicken to previous orders would be more likely to buy some chicken parmesan. That proved correct, with 10% of that group placing orders and leading all other groups. Meanwhile, Noodles & Company has also sent information on those segments to its paid media buyer, who’s been able to cut the company’s advertising costs by targeting only the audiences most likely to place an order. Amperity's Stitch algorithm finds the common links in customer data. “We took out of Amperity anybody who's ordered delivery, and then we take that audience to paid media and they've been able to find other people like those who order delivery,” Pool said. Beyond pulling data from different places, Amperity has also pitched in by cleaning up said data and more clearly identifying core customers. Its Stitch algorithms, for example, can determine from a person’s name, email address, street address, birth date, gender and other traits across multiple profiles if data belongs to distinct individuals or all to one person. With cookies and third-party data disappearing, there’s increasing emphasis on the value of first-party data for brands. As both Amperity and its partners at Noodles & Company have discovered, it pays for that information to be as accurate and continually updated as possible if you want to keep moving chicken parm. “We know that your highest value customers are interacting with your brand the most,” McDonagh said.” You want to make sure you're knowing every interaction that they have, so we have the most robust data about every customer we can.”

B2B

Case Study: How Noodles & Company Found the Right Data Recipe for Loyalty

Amperity helped the restaurant chain grow by turning existing fans into regulars

Jason Notte

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Jason Notte