Nov. 13, 2026

I Know Exactly Where Your Guest Retention Answers Are. Can I Show You?

Ask us restaurant marketers how we understand our guests, and we’ll open our CRM, our CDP, or our rewards program and look at purchase behavior. I 100% used to do this.

That makes sense. Purchase data is important, it tells a lot of real stories, and it’s honestly the only data most of those tools hold.

But purchase data only tells you the what. It doesn’t tell you the why. And without the why, the what can point you in the wrong direction.

THE WHAT CAN LIE

Josh Halpern, Chief Business Officer at Craveworthy Brands, tells this story all the time. He goes to a burger chain a lot, and that chain sends him a steady stream of offers. Try the milkshake. Try the chicken sandwich. Come back for this.

What they don’t know is that Josh doesn’t go there for himself. He goes because it’s what his son wants, and it’s on the way home from hockey practice.

On paper, he’s a burger guy. In real life, he’s a hockey dad, and the kid picks the spot.

Josh has another one I love. A group of kids hanging out on a Friday night decides to order food. Do you think they pick a place because somebody has a $5 coupon? Or because it’s good, it’s cool, it’s affordable, and it’s close?

Every operator I know says they want to stop discounting and market on value. You can’t market on value until you know what your guests actually value. That’s what sentiment tells you.

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN WE LISTENED

Every time I’ve run a sentiment analysis review at Handcraft Burgers and Brew over the last few months, the same thing has come back. Guests talk about our gluten-free options all the time, they love them, and we were barely marketing them. They were just options on the menu, and they were nearly impossible to find on our website.

(Honestly though, our gluten-free burgers, fries and tots are bangin’!)

So we listened. We built an allergens page on our site, started posting regular gluten-free content on social, and leaned in.

In one week, I got four DMs from people asking about our gluten-free food. That’s never happened. A content creator reached out wanting to feature it. And our most recent gluten-free content outperformed most of what we’ve put out lately.

Then I checked the sales:

We had our best gluten-free week in three months, about 25% above the weeks before it.
Guests whose first order is gluten-free come back about 50% more often than everyone else.

Guests were telling us what they loved the whole time. We just weren’t hearing them.

HOW TO START HEARING THEM

You don’t need to tie every review to every receipt. The tech isn’t quite there yet. But if you understand how guests talk about what they do and who they are, you can pattern match it to purchase behavior. It’s close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades.

Ovation gives us first-party feedback from guests after every visit.
Marqii pulls in what they’re saying in reviews across every platform.

Then I stack it on top of our sales data and use AI to connect the dots. That last part is where the magic happens, and it’s exactly what I help brands set up.