Olo

📹 Leading restaurants like bartaco, California Fish Grill, and First Watch Restaurants trust Olo to deliver visibility and deep insights into guest preferences and behavior. Download our ebook on guest lifetime value to learn how your brand can attract and retain more loyal guests. https://bit.ly/49TcDEb

You’re lucky in your career if you get the opportunity to work on a truly breakthrough product. Something that revolutionizes an industry. If you get just one of those in your career, you should consider yourself fortunate. We launched Olo 19 years ago and we’ve since been fortunate enough to launch several breakthrough products. Starting with text message ordering in 2005, years before the iPhone was announced. It hadn’t been done before and it put Olo on the map. 2008 helped us realize that we must pivot to serving restaurants as a B2B offering to achieve scale. So in 2009, we introduced enterprise online ordering, which was POS and payment integrated and branded to look and feel like the brand. It was all wrapped up as a SaaS (software as a service) offering with a monthly fee instead of an upfront and ongoing investment of tens of millions on a homegrown platform. Restaurant guests wanted the food brought to their doorstep, so in 2016, we introduced nationwide direct delivery as a service with the launch of Dispatch. Then came the unprecedented. In 2020, COVID rocked the restaurant industry, and Olo scrambled to help dozens of brands activate online ordering, contactless pickup, and delivery so they could continue operating safely. I believe we will look back on 2022 and the introduction of Borderless as a watershed moment for the industry. Our customers came together and created something that benefits everybody. As a result, millions of Borderless guests now enjoy passwordless, secure logins and faster checkout experiences across the entire Borderless network of restaurants. 2024 has accelerated the road to 100% digital. We’ve expanded strategic POS partnerships with providers such as Qu POS, NCR Voyix, and TRAY, positioning restaurants to collect and connect the dots of guest data from every transaction to provide truly personalized experiences and make every guest feel like a regular. As I reflect on 19 years of innovation, 19 years of breakthrough moments have become our legacy and motivation in pursuit of our mission: Hospitality at Scale™️ That’s the ideal future state for the restaurant industry and its guests. In our history lies the blueprint for accelerating the future.

Now serving: customized capacity management rules 🍟 Emil Narciso explains how this latest feature makes it easy for brands to streamline operations and set clear guest expectations in one dashboard. 👀 More innovation ahead - stay tuned for our Summer Release later this week!

bartaco has unlocked scalable growth by tapping into the right tech stack for the brand. Join us for a live webinar as Scott Lawton shares how your brand can get ahead of the curve. Register: https://bit.ly/3XVZyYm

"Olo Engage allows us to take the Five Guys experience our founders provided guests in 1986 and apply it to an enterprise." Now serving: A fresh case study with our friends at Five Guys Enterprises 🍔 https://bit.ly/4czU49U

We went from zero to 5 million Borderless users in two years 🤯 Ahead of our Summer Release, we're revisiting our first-ever release in 2022, when we introduced our passwordless guest login and checkout, Borderless, to the world. Talk about a #ThrowbackThursday Today, Borderless is available to all Olo brands 🙌 Make sure your notifications are on because our Summer Release is next week 🔜

Does it feel like you’re gambling with your marketing budget? John Wanamaker, the Philadelphia department store magnate, famously said in 1922: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” 102 years later, much of the restaurant industry still grapples with the same dilemma. Despite technological advances, many restaurants struggle to pinpoint the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Today’s restaurant executives understand that marketing ROI is more art than science. This is especially true in a landscape cluttered with daily deals and third-party marketplaces, where traditional earn-and-burn loyalty programs often lack the strategic context necessary for true guest engagement. Restaurants need efficient and effective marketing strategies to drive traffic, boost check averages, and attract new guests. Enter Five Guys Enterprises. After decades of grassroots marketing, Five Guys has grown into a personalized marketing strategy. Steve Teller, VP of Digital Strategy at Five Guys said it best, “Olo Engage allows us to take the Five Guys experience our founders provided guests in 1986 and apply it to an enterprise.” These personalized marketing efforts drive profitable acquisition, retention, and growth through customer lifetime value (CLV), or guest lifetime value (GLV) as we like to call it at Olo. GLV determines how valuable a guest is to your business based on recency, frequency, and spend using the data a restaurant already collects from all sorts of touch points, including order and payment data. Over a six month period with a group of 150 restaurants, Five Guys launched several data-driven campaigns, including an email inviting guests to add Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to their milkshakes. This small suggestions yielded sweet results: 1.2k unique orders, accounting for $2 million in sales and an increase in overall shake sales by 1%. Industry wide, 70% of restaurant guests never return after their first visit, while the top 15% of guests drive 50% of sales. Knowing who your highest-value guests are and how to engage them is crucial. Restaurants can leverage guest data to nurture their top guests and also encourage behavior change of non-top GLV guests (i.e. offers to try a high attachment entree). Want to increase marketing effectiveness? Start by asking: what’s your average GLV? If you’re searching for the answer, Olo can help.

bartaco CEO and Co-founder Scott Lawton will join Olo's "3 Growth Strategies to Help Emerging Brands Thrive" webinar to share key takeaways to accelerate growth by delivering experiences that drive loyalty. Ready to secure your spot? Visit https://lnkd.in/gehemGX3 #bartaco #bartacolife

Got burning questions for Dave's Hot Chicken and bartaco? 🔥 Ask away! Join us for a live webinar on July 31 when Dave's Hot Chicken CTO Leon Davoyan, EMBA, bartaco CEO & Founder Scott Lawton, and Olo Senior Manager of Partnerships Hillary Holmes discuss the growth strategies that propelled their brands to success. Register: https://bit.ly/3XVZyYm

Any restaurant accountants out there fed up with tedious, time-consuming reconciliation? ✋ Olo Pay is built specifically for restaurants and has detail-level reporting that can help accountants troubleshoot easily. Learn more from Sneha Goel ⬇️