Why Your Customer Notes Are Quietly Costing You Money
Walk into any decent neighbourhood spot in London and the floor team can usually tell you who's a regular, what they drink, who's in for date night, and who only ever came in once because their mum was visiting. They know. The system, on the other hand, hasn't got a clue.
That's the gap most operators live with. Booking platforms and CRMs are full of useful information about guests. The problem is that none of it is in a format you can actually do anything with.
Notes like "loves a good Malbec" or "birthday in March, always brings her mum" are great. They show your team is paying attention. But buried in a free-text field next to a reservation, they're useless. You can't search them. You can't pull a list before a wine tasting. You can't find every guest who came in for Valentine's last year and email them in early January, before the rest of Soho gets in there first.
That's the difference between a note and a tag. Over a year, it's the difference between a quiet Tuesday and a full one.
What tagging actually means
Tagging is just giving guests structured, searchable labels. Instead of a note saying "keen on wine events," they get tagged as Wine Enthusiast. Instead of "booked for Valentine's last year," they get tagged Valentine's Regular. Same information. Completely different outcome. Sounds like a small change, isn't.
Once the data is structured, you can use it. Pull every Wine Enthusiast and send them early access when you're putting a tasting on. Find your Valentine's regulars in week one of January and get the booking link in front of them before they've even started thinking about it. Split your whole database by behaviour, frequency, and spend, and talk to each group like you actually know them.
And you do know them. You've just been storing that knowledge in a format that made it impossible to act on.
What it looks like in revenue
Say you've got 4,000 guests in your CRM. Right now, when you're filling a wine pairing dinner, you blast all 4,000. Open rates are middling. Unsubscribes creep up. The wine crowd doesn't feel any more spoken to than the people who only ever come in for the burger.
Now picture you've been tagging properly for six months. You've got 600 guests tagged Wine Enthusiast. You send to those 600. The email is relevant, the timing is right, it feels personal. Open rate is up. Conversion is up. You fill the dinner without knocking £20 off the ticket and wrecking the margin.
Targeted emails beat broadcast emails on every measure that matters: open rate, click-through, revenue per send. Always. The operators who figure this out early stop competing on discount and start competing on relevance, which is a much better game to be in.
Automations are only as good as the data behind them
Half the venues we walk into have already been sold on automated marketing. Birthday emails. Post-visit thank-yous. Win-back sequences for guests who've gone quiet. All sensible ideas. None of them work as well as they should if the data underneath hasn't been set up.
A birthday email is fine. A birthday email that mentions the guest usually drinks Picpoul and was last in with their partner for the tasting menu? That's a different thing entirely. One is a mailshot. The other makes someone feel remembered. Tagging is what turns the first into the second. Without it, you're sending the same line to everyone and hoping it lands.
The good news: you're already collecting the data. Your team makes notes every shift. The question is whether you've got a system that turns those notes into something the marketing engine can actually use, or whether they're going to sit in a free-text field for another year doing nothing.
If it's the latter, that's a few thousand pounds in revenue parked on a hard drive. Easiest fix in the building, frankly.
