Eggs Up Grill is one of the fastest growing brands in the breakfast category. The brand has already doubled its footprint over the past four years, reaching over 70 locations today. With 20 locations expected to open in 2024 - and another 100 under agreement or development - the brand has its sights on becoming a regional powerhouse, expanding beyond its Southeastern roots and into the Midwest and Texas.
Before opening stores in new markets, Eggs Up Grill needed to understand key metrics about their existing stores’ performance and trends about their guests.
Entering 2022, Eggs Up Grill set a goal to double the size of the brand over the next 18 months. To do so, they would need to expand beyond their South Carolina roots. These expansion plans raised difficult questions - how could they take the lessons learned from their best performing stores while scaling the brand?
Laura Boles, Marketing Director at Eggs Up Grill, led the charge on solving that challenge. Initially, she didn’t have insight into guest behaviors like retention and frequency. Without that data, it was challenging to understand why certain stores over-performed, while others did not. Sales data was a piece of the puzzle, but lacked contextual information about the business.
We didn’t really know who our guests were. We could look in the restaurants and say who we thought they were and how often they were coming, but we didn’t really have any data points to back up those claims.
She also didn’t have a baseline for understanding how past marketing campaigns contributed to sales. Laura and her team were left executing a strategy many restaurant operators are familiar with: sending email newsletters to their entire audience and hoping it would trigger a guest visit. Without a CDP, she was unable to track whether those newsletters were impacting guest visits at all, or prove the ROI of those campaigns to franchisees.
By understanding existing guest behavior and store-level metrics, Eggs Up Grill was able to personalize their marketing campaigns, improve their operational playbooks, and track which initiatives increased revenue.
Implementing Bikky allowed Eggs Up Grill to visualize data about their brand, stores, and guests for the very first time.
This helped Laura and her team go beyond high-level sales data to identify why certain restaurants perform better than others.
Bikky's Guest Retention dashboard enabled Laura to pinpoint which locations struggled with guest acquisition, retention, or frequency. She could visualize her customer base by channel, fulfillment method, day part, purchases, and demographics - each providing a different window into retention and performance. These insights allowed her to flag improvements to her operations team and create unique marketing strategies to further increase frequency.
With Bikky's segmentation product, Laura built rich email campaigns that engaged guests based on their order behavior while focusing on the local store ethos that was the foundation of their brand. Bikky’s ability to tie email campaigns directly to orders enabled Laura to report the real revenue impact of her campaigns to franchisees.
Marketing and operations go hand in hand, so if the data in Bikky tells us something, we can dig in with our operations team to make adjustments.
“If the return rate for a store isn’t what we expect, we can investigate what’s happening in the restaurant. We can look at the reviews - we can even go down to look at the way they’re preparing their home fries. We can then use email marketing to drive awareness of the changes we’ve made. With
Bikky’s dashboard, we’re able to see the revenue and retention impact of those changes.”
The Eggs Up Grill team grew sales by 11% per unit using insights about the business from Bikky. That growth, combined with the industry leading support they provide their franchisees, made new unit sales easier than ever.
Eggs Up Grill was able to roll out Bikky to all 50+ locations in just 6 weeks, far faster than the industry average of 6-12 months. That onboarding speed allowed Eggs Up Grill to quickly respond to a changing market and integrate existing data about their brand into their expansion plans.
Bikky was one of the easiest rollouts we’ve ever had.
“Their team moves fast like us. When we identify an opportunity to further understand our guests or support franchisees, their responsiveness has been incredible.”
As locations continue to open, Laura and her team need to remain nimble and test new marketing campaigns. Partnering with Bikky’s Customer Success and Product team allowed Laura and her team to implement new analytics capabilities, measure the speed at which guests return, and surface guest demographics to guide where to open Eggs Up Grill locations next.
Just one month after their full roll-out with Bikky, Eggs Up Grill launched a revamped marketing strategy based on their customer data, growing sales 11% year over year - two percentage points better than their prior month, and better than competitors across all markets.
After the first month of the campaign, Laura used Bikky to isolate the specific customer behaviors that helped the best performing locations achieve revenue 30% higher than the brand-wide goal. She took those learnings and used them to suggest improvements to her operations team, while further refining her marketing strategy to drive higher sales across channels.
For prospective franchisees, Laura can demonstrate the brand’s deep understanding of an Eggs Up Grill guest, how they invest in the brand through data, and how they track the performance of their marketing and operations initiatives.
“Prospective franchisees always ask ‘who is our guest?’ Now I can tell them exactly who they are.”
Beyond marketing, Laura has used Bikky to revolutionize Eggs Up Grill’s franchisee’s sales strategy, helping to add dozens of locations into the development pipeline. Prospective franchisees are able to see the level of insight and support corporate is able to give them. In a competitive franchisee market, it’s a true differentiator.
“They love that we offer this platform - all the data we can get out of it, transactions we can track, campaigns we can run. It’s one of the things they get the most excited about.”
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