When I worked in downtown Minneapolis, there was a cafe that served great Gyro Sandwiches in my building and since it was so clost (and good) Gyro’s became a regular lunch selection for me. Working out in the suburbs, there are not too many options for any kind of food let alone Greek. So when Christos opened a new restaurant in Minnetonka, my neighborhood, I was elated. I went over straght away and got a Gyro. It was awesome. While I was there was chatting with the host and kind of blurted out that their site… Well… Sucked. Turns out the host was the owner and he agreed. The rest is history. Read more below the image…
As it happens, the owner, Gus, was an long time friend of my fathers that I had not seen since I was about 5 years old. I was not sure how I remembered him or his name, but if you get a chance to meet Gus you will agree that he is hard to forget. Turns out that my father would go over to Gus’s house to play backgammon and he would bring me with.
As for his site – he wanted to be able to upload daily specials from all 3 restaurants, stay in contact with regulars and establish a longer relationship with first time or infrequent customers. This was accomplished with both digital and real world promotion campaigns to encourage mail list and facebook signup. We are planning on exploring some other social media options as well such as foursqualre.com and instagram.
The managers of the individual restaurants are able to upload the daily specials for their specific restaurants without having to go through me and do it quite well…
We have grown the email list to be several thousand with a less than 2% attrition rate which is kind of amazing considering the industry average is about 70%.
We have also added online reservations using the SeatMe.com reservation system from Yelp.com. The managers and hosts access and use the reservation through an iPad at the host station to manage it.
We are in the process of creating a custom subsite for the event space at Union Depot which is available for weddings, reunions and other large events.
