Segmentation Powers Marketing Precision
Fire & Vine’s marketing team has the ability to segment and analyze customer profiles, giving the company a more precise approach to engagement.
One key focus is on Fire & Vine’s private dining business, which accounts for 30-35% of total revenue. These guests differ from the average diner, as most are corporate clients booking events. “It’s a very important segment for us to watch… It’s also a segment that we have to be careful about from a marketing perspective, because they tend to not want to engage as much as a regular consumer,” Mackay explained.
CrowdTwist enables Fire & Vine to track check data and develop campaigns targeted at distinct customer groups. “We are starting to build up that knowledge base so that we can be much more targeted at different groups for driving that next level business,” Mackay said.
Personalized Rewards That Matter
Initially, Fire & Vine’s primary goal was to convert its 12 year-old legacy loyalty program into CrowdTwist without making drastic changes. “The focus for the first quarter was to just make it work like the old one,” Mackay said. He shared his early experience with implementing the RTN Data Standards at MURTEC 2024. But by Q1 and Q2 of 2025, Fire & Vine plans to demonstrate the full power of its new system.
Personalization is at the heart of this new loyalty strategy. The marketing team is working on offers exclusively for loyal customers, such as menu tastings or guest advisory board dinners. While Fire & Vine has hosted advisory dinners before, they never leveraged loyalty data to hand-pick participants. “You’re sitting down breaking bread together, and you have a really incredible opportunity with 12 to 15 people to have a lively discussion about what we’re doing right, what we need to do to be better, and what they want to see from us in the future,” Mackay said.
Enhancing Employee Engagement
Fire & Vine also plans to create personalized loyalty programs for employees, offering dining credits and incentives for long-term service, training completion, and successful employee referrals. This approach aims to engage employees in ways that go beyond traditional pay and benefits. “We brainstormed on ‘what’s the next level’ to engage them, so that we can reward them separately and differently than the general public,” Mackay said.
A Data-Driven Future
With Oracle CrowdTwist and RTN Data Standards in place, Fire & Vine now operates with a 360-degree view of its customers. Comprehensive customer profiles empower the company to not only recognize and reward customers for specific menu selections, but also expand engagement.
