Restaurant CRM: how to turn your bookings into a guest database

What do you do with your booking data? Chances are you’re not making the most of it.

The most common mistake venues make with booking data is treating it as a table hold. A name, a time and a party size come in at 7:30. The table is cleared by 9:30 and the reservation record sits in a list nobody opens again. That booking was the start of a restaurant CRM (customer relationship management system). But for many venues, it becomes nothing more than wasted data.

A restaurant CRM is where a venue keeps what it knows about each guest. This includes visits, preferences, dietary requirements and how to reach them. Plenty of venues pay for email and SMS tools for marketing purposes. These give them thin lists for contact and promotional purposes. Bookings, however, are one of the few places guests hand over accurate details willingly, because they want a table.

This guide is for anyone interested in learning how to market their venues better with more accurate and targeted guest data. Whether you work for a single large venue, a group of multiple restaurants or one local cafe, you could help your establishment by building a stronger guest database with booking data.

We’ll cover various elements, including what a guest booking tells you and the people it misses. This article also delves into how you can maintain one profile across venues, five email campaigns you can run with booking data and who ultimately owns this data.

Key takeaways

• A booking gives you contact details, visit dates, party size and occasion notes. It misses the rest of the table and the guest's visits to your other venues.
• Five uses for booking data: VIP recognition, win-back messages, quiet-night offers, dietary notes and birthdays.
• Before you sign with a platform, check who owns the guest data and whether it runs a diner marketplace.
• me&u Reservations lets the booker invite their party, so invited guests get their own profile, and groups share one guestbook that feeds Connect, me&u's marketing platform.
• Guest data collected through me&u stays within your restaurant group and isn’t shared with other venues.

What a restaurant CRM does with booking data

A CRM is a contact list with a memory. Any reservation data you collect from guest bookings goes into your CRM. This then creates guest profiles, which you can group into segments or use to automate your service and maintain your restaurant loyalty program. You can also use the CRM to automate marketing messages for certain groups (e.g. people who haven’t visited in over 90 days).

Data reaches a CRM from bookings, Wi-Fi sign-ups, loyalty programs, ordering and your POS (point of sale, i.e. your till). Booking data arrives before guests visit, so staff can use it on the night. Our guide to how restaurant reservation software works follows one booking from the widget to the guest profile.

Is this an invasion of privacy? Not at all. Most people are very comfortable doing it.

In a survey of 1,916 adults run for the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner in March 2023, 81% said their name was fair and reasonable to give when using a service, 77% said the same of their email and 68% of their phone number¹. Those are the three fields a booking form asks for.

This is a relatively new strategy for venues, so don’t be alarmed if you’re not doing it effectively. “Five years ago fine-dining restaurants were really the only restaurants looking at guestbook analytics. Nowadays pretty much everyone with a reservation software is told how much value is found in knowing your consumer base,” one restaurant GM wrote on the r/Restaurant_Managers subreddit².

What a booking tells you, and what it doesn't

Here’s what a booking captures:

Unfortunately, reservations don’t show everything. A booking on its own won't show what the table spent, because that sits in your POS or ordering system.

It also won't show who else was at the table or if this guest is a regular at another venue you own or manage. These are common blind spots that can cost venues valuable insight that could be used to establish stronger customer loyalty.

Close the blind spot: know the person who booked and their guests

A table of six books on Saturday. One person made the booking, so one person automatically has a profile. The other five eat, drink and leave as strangers you can't thank, invite back or recognise. Across a year of weekend group bookings, those unnamed guests can easily outnumber the bookers.

This is a common problem for venues. So many guests come and go without anything in place to recognise and remember them. Those guests are potential loyalty customers or at the very least, repeat diners who can help you fill tables and earn more revenue. But without a proper CRM system in place, you’ll never know who they are.

You have three ways to fix it:

1. Ask the booker for everyone's details - This can work sometimes but most organisers won’t bother. It can also annoy guests if you make it compulsory and manual work. It’s tedious and it creates an unnecessary blockage between them and their meal.
2. Collect details at the table through a QR code, Wi-Fi or loyalty sign-up - Like the first option, participation can vary greatly. The data may also end up in a different system that doesn’t talk to your booking platform. It’s also a pain for your staff or guests to do this; it delays the ordering process, which can lead to a poor guest experience.
3. Let the booker invite their party, so each guest adds their own details and dietaries - This puts the responsibility in individuals’ hands and saves one person having to do it themselves. It can also be framed in a way that guests are defining their own experience before they arrive.

me&u Reservations uses the third option. The organiser books and sends their party an invite link. Each guest signs in with a one-time code, adds their own name and dietaries, and joins the booking. Everyone who joins is added to your guestbook, and staff can merge any duplicate profiles. This is safer than guessing whether two guests are the same person.

Building one guest profile across every venue

If your guest management software keeps a separate list for each venue, a guest who visits three of your venues looks like three different guests. A restaurant CRM covering your entire group of venues adds every booking to the same record. This means visits, notes and dietaries follow the guest from the pub to the restaurant to the cafe and so on.

Classic example: the regular who flew under the radar

John has booked a Friday table at your pub most weeks for two years. Staff have added a note: pale ale, likes the window booth. His wife books your flagship restaurant for their anniversary and invites him.

With a venue-specific approach, John goes unnoticed in your restaurant; just another first-time guest. With a group-wide approach, John joins his wife’s booking from her invite link and is added to the same guestbook your pub uses. His profile already holds his pub visits and notes, so you can personalise his dining experience with a window table and a welcome pale ale. One simple change and John suddenly feels seen and appreciated.

me&u Reservations keeps an organisation-level guestbook for groups. This way you can keep track of your regulars and new guests across multiple venues. The booking panel shows each guest's visit count at that venue, while their guestbook profile shows their history across every venue in the group. This helps you decide who needs extra attention. Guest history also stays within your group and isn't shared with other operators.

What guest data should you collect?

Only ask for what you'll use. You don’t want to create unnecessary friction for someone booking a table. The more information you ask for, the more friction you’ll create. This can deter people from reserving a table.

You just want whatever information you need to ensure a seamless dining experience and add guests to restaurant email marketing or a loyalty program (if they consent). Usually, you only need to collect:

• Full name
• Email
• Mobile
• Clear marketing opt-in
• Dietary requirements
• Special occasion

You may also want to ask for a date of birth and postcode, but only if you’ll use them. In that aforementioned OAIC survey, 62% of responders considered their date of birth fair to provide¹. me&u Reservations can capture both DOB and postcode, and they feed automations in Connect. This way you can create personalised email and SMS marketing campaigns, helping drive more return customers.

Item-level order history can also come from me&u Order & Pay, but only at venues that use this platform. Without it, profiles are built from bookings, visits and staff notes. This often takes more time and results in more human errors borne from using multiple sources for guest information.

The team at St Andrews Beach Brewery reported shorter order wait times, greater guest data and an increase in average order value when they implemented Order & Pay in our detailed case study.

“When people are using the menu platform we definitely see the average order value go up. You know, even when I'm here with my mates, when they can just order through the QR code, they tend to spend a little bit more too,” explained a brewery representative in the case study.

They also highlighted the benefits of greater guest data for their business: “For us, one of the biggest benefits of the platform is we get a lot of customer data from the table ordering itself. And a lot of that data flows into our CRM, which we can then reach people with.”

How to use booking data for restaurant email marketing and guest loyalty: five campaign ideas

Booking data is important for running more effective email marketing and loyalty programs. We’ve outlined five potential campaigns below which all rely on this data. Remember to only message guests who have opted in and always follow the privacy and spam rules in your market.

1. VIP recognition

Make a segment of your most frequent guests within your CRM and tell staff when they’ve booked a table at the beginning of the shift. A restaurant reservation system with a pre-shift brief lists VIPs, dietary requirements and large groups for the team before doors open. Reward guest loyalty with personal welcomes, complimentary drinks or starters or whatever best reflects your appreciation.

One restaurant GM explained how they use booking data to treat VIPs on the r/Restaurant_Managers subreddit³: “It helps me decide if you deserve a better table or how fast to seat you if there is a wait [...] Many of my guests have my personal cell number and I always treat them like VIPs.”

2. Win-back messages

You can set the lapse window by tracking how often a guest normally visits. You might do a six-week window for a weekly regular or a 12-month window for a twice-a-year guest. You wouldn’t do it the other way around. Add a personal note (e.g. “your booth's free on Friday if you’re free”), which can work without including a discount. Our guide on recency email automations has many more ideas for winning back old guests.

3. Quiet-night offers

Track guests who have booked on weekdays in the past and only send your Tuesday “quiet-night” offer to them instead of spamming your entire contact book. This strategic email marketing segmentation can help increase conversions. Personalised emails or those with greater personal relevance have a 26% higher open rate than generic ones⁴.

4. Remembering dietary requirements

Food allergy affects around 5 to 10% of children and 2 to 4% of adults in Australia and New Zealand⁵. With a restaurant CRM covering your entire venue group, you can note each guest’s dietary needs at every venue they visit. So if a coeliac guest first dines at your pub then your restaurant, you can be ready the second time with recommended menu options. You can also email these segmented guests with relevant menu updates.

5. Personalised birthday invitations

Use stored dates of birth or past occasion notes to invite guests to book a few weeks before their birthday. You might be able to entice them while they're still choosing where to go. me&u’s Connect CRM can send it as an automated message.

You can learn more strategies for conversion-focused automated email campaigns by watching episode three of our Pantry Essentials webinar series. Mark Sudweeks and Kirsty Beriman have the skills to pay the bills (or at the very least convert first-time visitors into loyal locals).

Reward guest loyalty through your booking data

A dedicated loyalty program can overarch all of these campaign ideas. Around 41% of US sit-down diners called loyalty membership an important factor in choosing a restaurant⁶.

Although this report doesn’t publish the data size, it still indicates strong interest in programs that reward frequent guests. You can learn more about creating a restaurant loyalty program via our blog.

Always know who owns your guest data

Some booking platforms also run a diner marketplace: a site or app where guests discover and book venues. A guest who books there has an account with the platform, which can market other venues to them.

For venues that rely on discovery, that trade can be worth it, but the relationship is shared. Bookings through your own website and socials don’t result in your guests being offered other restaurants. Not all of these booking platforms let you own your guests’ data. It’s important to check this before you start relying on one for your reservations.

Ask every provider, in writing:

• Can I export every profile, with visits and opt-ins, at any time?
• Can you market other venues to guests who book me through your marketplace?
• Is guest data shared between operators or held per venue or across my group?
• What happens to my data if I leave?

These will reveal how much booking data you actually own. Afterwards, you may decide you want to use a restaurant CRM that gives you more ownership and freedom.

Trust matters here too: 84% of Australians in the OAIC survey want more control over how their information is collected and used, so clear opt-ins protect your list¹. Learn more about how me&u's restaurant reservation software and Connect CRM handle guest profiles in compliance with these data laws and requirements. You can also contact our team if you want to chat to someone about all of this and other CRM capabilities.

Frequently asked questions

What is a restaurant CRM?

A restaurant CRM stores what a venue knows about each guest and lets it act on that information. Profiles hold contact details, visit history, preferences, dietaries and marketing consent. Venues use them to recognise guests and send targeted campaigns. Some run a standalone CRM; others use the guest profiles in their reservations platform alongside a marketing tool.

What guest data should restaurants collect?

Start with name, email, mobile and a clear marketing opt-in. Dietaries and occasion notes help on the night, while date of birth and postcode support pre-birthday messaging and local campaigns. Keep the form short, since each extra field is another reason for a potential guest to abandon the booking.

Who owns guest data on a booking platform?

It depends on the platform and your contract. Bookings through your own channels generally keep the relationship with you, while a marketplace booking can give the platform its own relationship with the guest. Ask about exports, sharing between operators and what happens if you leave. If you’re using me&u Reservations and Connect CRM, guest history stays within your group.

How do I use booking data for marketing?

Group guests by how often they visit, when they last came in, which venues they use and what they celebrate. Match a message to each group, such as a win-back note or a birthday invite, and send only to opted-in guests. Automate what works, then track which messages lead to a table reservation.