The DataDelivers Playbook: Reaching the Guests You Were Never Allowed to Email
Firebirds Wood Fired Grill knew its opted-in guests well, and knew exactly where that knowledge ended.
The gap: Firebirds was collecting guest data from every system that touches a guest, and had no permission to contact most of the guests in it.
The playbook: consolidate every touchpoint into one platform, reach non-members through permissioned channels, match the message to the guest, and measure everything against a held-out control group.
The result: in the first 60 days of the email program in live test markets, measured alongside the brand's other marketing, a 7% traffic increase versus control locations, and Inner Circle membership growing about 5% faster than control.
About this playbookDataDelivers built this playbook from the published Firebirds case study. It covers one lane of that story: reaching the guests outside the opt-in list. For the full story, read the Firebirds case study.
For going on 15 years, Firebirds has run the Inner Circle, and by its own description it's not a loyalty program: no points to track, nothing to earn, nothing required of the guest. What members get instead is recognition. They are recognized, surprised, and occasionally rewarded, and in exchange Firebirds gets the data to make each visit more personal.
It's also, by definition, a program made up of the guests who already said yes.
Everyone else was a different story: the walk-ins, the bar and patio crowd, the guests who came through a third-party order and never opted in. Despite having data from reservations, point of sale, online ordering, and payment processing, Firebirds had no permission to contact them.
"We were already collecting their information," says Christine Lorusso, VP of Digital Marketing at Firebirds. "We just weren't allowed to market to them."
That's the gap the DataDelivers playbook closes. Here's how Firebirds ran it.
Move 1 — Put Every Guest Touchpoint in One Place
Firebirds consolidated data into the DataDelivers platform from every system that touches a guest: point of sale, payment processing, reservations, online ordering. The payment-processor feed is the one that does the identification work, and a single step in the middle of it makes the difference.
A card payment becomes a persistent, anonymized token. Visits, spend, and menu items all attach to that token, so the guest becomes trackable, but a trackable guest is still not a known one. The token carries no name and no permission to contact anyone, and a guest who pays with two cards looks like two strangers. Every card-tracking platform gets this far, and a brand sitting at this stage still can't send anything.
Matching is the step that turns a token into a person. The platform resolves those tokens against DataDelivers' embedded consumer data, and the matchable portion comes back as a named guest with a contact channel the brand is allowed to use. Several cards belonging to one person collapse into one guest instead of several, with a safeguard running the other way to keep two different guests from being merged into one. Not every token matches, which is why the honest scope is the matchable portion rather than the whole base. The ones that do match are guests Firebirds can name, with no loyalty signup anywhere in the sequence.
That changed what the brand could see before it changed what the brand could send. Firebirds could finally tell what share of guests are loyalty members and reachable, what share aren't, and how the two groups behave: who comes in weekly, who shows up for celebrations, who only orders to-go.
Move 2 — Reach the Guests Outside the Program
Matching tells the brand who a guest is, but reaching that guest takes permission, and the permission doesn't have to be the brand's own. DataDelivers already has permission to email matched guests through a channel outside the brand's list, and that channel is the one the campaign goes out on. Firebirds never has to collect an opt-in it doesn't have. It runs a monthly cadence of campaigns aimed specifically at guests who are not in the Inner Circle, the audience the brand had never once been able to talk to.
For a brand that describes itself as a smaller concept without the budget to blanket the market with advertising, the point isn't that this was second-best to buying reach. The better audience was already in the restaurant. Keeping the guests you have beats renting new ones, and these guests just needed a compliant way to hear from the brand. DataDelivers "delivers" that ability.
Move 3 — Match the Message to the Guest
Firebirds doesn't send the same email to everyone, because its guests aren't the same. Menu history drives the imagery. The dish a guest actually orders is the dish that shows up in their inbox. Segmentation keeps the wrong message away from the wrong guest: the happy-hour promotion never goes to the guest who has never ordered a drink, and that slot may talk about a new seafood special instead.
The personalization doesn't stop at the inbox. In Firebirds' own program, guest preferences flow from its guest database back into its reservation platform, so a manager knows the booth-versus-table preference before the guest sits down, and top spenders are tagged automatically. The email is one surface of a relationship the whole restaurant can see.
Move 4 — Measure Everything Against a Held-Out Control Group
Every month, the DataDelivers team walks Firebirds through results live, measured against a held-out control group. The control group sets the baseline for what guests would have spent anyway, and the program is credited only with what it moves above that line. The trace runs the whole way: an email open, followed to the store visit, down to the exact check.
Lorusso is blunt about the alternative: "You could sit in a boardroom and everybody wants to know about the open rates, the click-through rates, and the social media engagement. But if you don't have a way to track all of that back to a store visit or to an increase in traffic or sales, then all it is is vanity metrics."
"A lot of people have trouble tracking incremental revenue. Knowing what a consumer would do in the absence of communicating with them is an impossible task without the right structure. You have to set up well-designed baseline control groups to truly understand what those behaviors look like. That takes a lot of discipline and statistical rigor to get those groups constructed well, so you can accurately prove ROI."
Joel Schiltz, CEO, DataDeliversWhat 60 Days Showed
In the first 60 days of testing, locations running the program saw a 7% increase in traffic versus control locations, measured alongside the brand's other marketing initiatives in those test markets. That is exactly why the control group matters: it isolates what the program itself moved. Inner Circle membership in the test locations also grew faster than control, conservatively about 5%.
Just as valuable was what the measurement replaced. "In the past, we'd see an increase in traffic and we wouldn't know what channel it was coming from," Lorusso says. Now traffic spikes and check increases attribute to specific campaigns, and to specific dollars.
"We can track an open in an email all the way down to a check, and we can actually determine the exact ROI from our efforts. I think that's much more impactful and helpful than just knowing what an open rate percentage was."
Christine Lorusso, VP of Digital Marketing, Firebirds Wood Fired GrillWhat the Team Had to Bring: Introductions and Creative
Firebirds' side of the work: make the introductions to their payment processor and loyalty partner, and send over the creative. DataDelivers handled the integrations, built the HTML, tested the sends, recommended timing and subject lines, and absorbed the obstacles along the way. The same account team has run the program since day one.
"Being a smaller restaurant concept, we don't always have a lot of time to spend on preparing things like that. What I liked about DataDelivers is that they did all of that legwork. They worked on figuring out integrations with our payment processor, and they handled the rest. I just send them creative."
Christine Lorusso, VP of Digital Marketing, Firebirds Wood Fired GrillPrerequisites to Run This Playbook
The four moves above assume four things are already true. If they aren't, this is where the work starts.
A platform that isn't already connected to your reservation provider, your online ordering partner, and your POS will spend your first quarter building connections instead of running campaigns. Ask which integrations already exist before you ask anything else. An integration that still has to be built is a timeline, not a feature.
This is part of why Firebirds could start at the campaign rather than at the plumbing. The brand made the introductions, and the connections to its payment processor, loyalty provider, and reservation platform were established from there, obstacles included. The case study walks through how that sequence actually went.
The data that makes a report read well and the data that moves traffic are rarely the same data. Choose by what you could act on tomorrow morning. If a report can't tell you which guests to talk to and what to say, it describes your business without helping you run it. If your campaign reporting can't connect a send to a store visit, start there.
"When it comes to the data side of things, it can be really overwhelming when you're looking at all of the different partners that are out there. Looking at what is actually actionable over what just seems nice is the first step. It's about what's going to have the biggest impact on your business and then going after it."
Every third party in your stack, from delivery to reservations to online ordering, is accumulating guest data that describes your business. The challenge is that some of it you can get back, while some of it you can't. The brand's own guest record has to live somewhere you control and can act on, not somewhere you file export requests.
Firebirds had made that call well before this program started, which is why there was something to consolidate when the time came. A brand that hasn't will find this prerequisite is the whole first phase rather than a checkbox.
Bad data rarely fails in a way anyone can see. It produces confident numbers that are wrong, and a brand acts on them for a quarter before anyone notices. Verify that guest records are accurate and current before the first campaign, not after the first result that doesn't make sense.
"If the data is not clean or accurate, the entire program is going to fail and give you false results. If you can fully trust what you're seeing, the rest falls into place."
Read the Full Case Study
The complete Firebirds story: the program, the numbers, and the partnership, in their words.
Read the Firebirds Case StudyAnd if you want to know what your own guest data would show, how many of your guests you can actually see and what the unseen ones are worth, that's a conversation we have with restaurant brands every week.