Goodbye, comment cards: TMG improves its reach with Adentro

The Trifecta Management Group (TMG) is a heavy-hitting team of seasoned professionals known for creating, consulting on, and managing some of the restaurant industry’s most dynamic concepts and brands. Their diverse portfolio of businesses includes hotels, spas, casinos, family entertainment centers and bars.

TMG is famous for its custom concepts, including The Corner Alley®, 4th Street Bar & Grill, Uptown Alley, All-Star Alley, O’Cleary’s Irish Pub, Axis alley and more. They feature excellent food, innovative interiors and elevated drink menus. Their Senior Manager of Marketing, Sarah Vigil, oversees a small team that takes on everything from big grand openings to email campaigns.

Challenge: Success wasn’t in the cards

Sarah inherited a messy contact collection and email marketing system when she joined TMG. She says, “95% of our contacts were coming from handwritten sign up sheets.” To keep from getting bogged down in data entry, her team mailed all the sheets off to a third-party service that manually transcribed them into a database.

The service also handled email marketing for the group, but they were slow and difficult to work with. It could take them more than a week to create a new email. And if TMG needed to change content or images at the last minute, it could take days. But the worst part was that results were awful. Sarah says, “Some venues were getting just a 2% open rate.”

Sarah knew they were missing an opportunity. They were collecting only 50-100 contacts each week. Thousands of customers were coming in, but they weren’t interested in filling out the cards.

“Our signups have been amazing. Every month we look at our list and can’t believe how much it’s grown.”

Sarah Vigil, Senior Manager of Marketing, Trifecta Management Group

Solution: TMG decided to go DIY

Sarah needed to increase the number of contacts collected. She wanted to make it simple for customers to sign up. The process needed to be automated because she didn’t want to get stuck sorting and entering contacts.

TMG also had to ensure the emails they sent were timely. It was nice to have a service taking care of creative, but she knew a better solution would be to put the creative back in her team’s hands so they could make any changes needed on the spot. She says, “We always felt really behind because the tools weren’t at our fingertips.”

TMG believed it could be more successful by bringing everything back in house. Automating collection seemed like the way to go because it kept pressure off TMG’s three-person marketing team so they could spend more time on email creative.

Result: Everything works better

Adentro uses the guest WiFi network at each location to automatically collect customer contact information when customers sign on. It includes an email composer that makes it easy to create campaigns. Once they started using Adentro, TMG saw a sharp uptick in the number of contacts collected.

One of their busier locations had only collected around 5,000 contacts in
seven years. They doubled that in just 3 months with Adentro. Sarah says,
“Our signups have been amazing. Every month we look at our lists and can’t
believe how much they’ve grown.”

They can modify text and images instantly, so if a property calls her with a
change, she can make it right away. These features completely replaced
the need for the service they were using. She saw open rates increase to
an average of 20%. TMG can also monitor their Walk-Through Rate^TM — a proprietary metric that shows when a customer who received an email visits in the next seven days.

Sarah was able to dramatically improve results. Her team now has a way
to collect contacts and send emails that help her team maintain TMG’s
standards for success. She says, “One of the biggest issues, honestly, was
getting the messaging out.” Now they can get it out without anything slowing them down.