Restaurant Marketing
Restaurant CRM: What It Is and Do You Actually Need One?
A restaurant CRM (customer relationship management) is your list of guests together with what you know about them — visits, spend, reservations, loyalty points, preferences and notes — and the tools to act on it, such as segments and email campaigns. Whether you need a separate one depends on where your guest data already lives: if bookings, ordering and loyalty run in one system, its guest list may be all the CRM you need; if they run in three, a CRM is how you stop keeping three lists.
What a restaurant CRM does
- One profile per guest, built from bookings, orders and loyalty.
- Visit history and spend, so your regulars are visible.
- Notes and tags staff can see — an allergy, a favourite table, a guest to look after.
- Segments: new, returning, away for a while, frequent, high spend.
- Email campaigns to a segment, with consent and unsubscribes handled.
- An export, so the data is never locked in.
Do you need one?
| Situation | The guest list in your existing system | A separate CRM |
|---|---|---|
| One venue, with bookings and loyalty in one system | Usually enough | Rarely worth the extra tool |
| Several systems that do not share guests | Several partial lists | Brings them together — if it connects to all of them |
| Several venues sharing a guest base | One list per venue | Often needed |
| No guest contact details collected yet | Nothing to manage yet | Start collecting first |
What to check before you choose
- Where the data comes from: does it connect to your bookings, orders and loyalty, or will someone type guests in by hand?
- Consent: does it record whether a guest agreed to marketing, and respect an unsubscribe everywhere?
- Staff access: can front-of-house see an allergy note without seeing everything else?
- Export: can you take the whole list with you?
- Deletion: can you delete a guest when they ask you to?
Making it useful
- Agree as a team what goes into a staff note — and what does not.
- Look at your segments once a month and write one message to one group, not one message to everyone.
- Measure returning guests rather than email opens.
The rules and habits behind a guest list: what first-party guest data is.
Guest profiles in Thmenu
Thmenu's Customer Profiles list brings your loyalty members and the guests who booked with you into one list, with visits, spend, points and reservations for each guest. Segments such as new, returning, away for 30 days or more, frequent and high spend are worked out from your own orders, reservations and loyalty records; staff can add tags and notes, and the list exports as CSV. Email campaigns go to all subscribers or to one segment, only to addresses that subscribed, each with an unsubscribe link. An account runs one venue, and Thmenu does not connect to other point-of-sale systems, so guests and orders from outside Thmenu do not appear in the list.