The Savored Blog

Over the course of the past year or so, we’ve all read a number of (very well-played) satirical interpretations of what people’s email addresses/domains say about them.  While joking about some of those same stereotypes around our office last week, I decided it would be interesting to examine the rumored hypotheses from a Savored lens – and the results are worth sharing!

To complete this analysis, we first broke our subscriber list into sub-groups by email domain; several big groups instantly emerged (Gmail, AOL, etc.), and we took it upon ourselves to categorize the smaller segments – typically emails tied to a company – into broader types, i.e. financial industries vs. consulting vs. advertising.  To further spice things up, we broke out our 32 Savored employees as a league of our own.

Age – not surprisingly, members still relying on AOL and other ISPs (Comcast, ATT, etc.) for their email needs are the oldest of the bunch.

Viral Coefficient - an important metric for any Internet business is its viral coefficient, or in other words, the propensity for members to spread the word about the service/product.  A quick regression of age vs. viral coefficient revealed that for every year older a Savored member becomes, his/her propensity to invite others to the service drops at a statistically significant rate of 0.05%.  It was no surprise, then, to learn that Yahoo, AOL, ISPs and government/non-profit employees are the least likely to give us a nod.  A close cousin to viral coefficient is invitation acceptance rate; after all, there’s limited benefit to inviting people if they don’t actually join the service!  Accordingly, we give a major hat tip to our friends in advertising, marketing and PR, who are not only viral, but who also boast an invitation acceptance rate close to 50%, higher than any other cohort (save for Savored employees, of course!).

Customer Activation and Engagement – a metric near and dear to the hearts of our marketing team, customer activation rates were highest among those members who use their work email addresses for Savored reservations; extrapolating with some creative license here, we’re hoping this means client-facing professionals are using Savored to indulge a bit further with their expense accounts.  Subscribers boasting AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail and miscellaneous ISP email addresses have proven the least likely to actually use our service to book reservations.  Not surprisingly, our Savored clan boasts 100% activation – we all use the service regularly (maybe even a bit too often based on the spring diet scuttlebutt!).  That said, our ISP email members (ATT, Comcast, Roadrunner, among others) are consistently the most engaged with email where open and clickthrough rates are concerned…maybe they’re spreading the word offline?  Moreover, this same group boasts our most loyal users once they get going; repeat purchase rates for ISP email addresses, AOL, etc. are some of our highest across the board.

Like good little data scientists, we also break our customer activation rates into more digestible time periods (i.e. what % of new sign-ups make a reservation the first day they join); these early engagement metrics are still highest for our friends dialing in from office email.

Fun Facts: With the help of our friends at Sailthru, we also took a quick look at how interests differ (cuisines, neighborhoods, top restaurants booked) by email type; the chart below provides some fun highlights.  For sample size reasons, we’re just looking at NYC today – apologies to our friends in other markets.

• From the numbers, it looks like just our Savored sample set and the Gmail cohort have a tendency to walk on the “wild” side where cuisine is concerned, with almost all other groups flocking primarily to Italian or American cuisines.
• Many of our older users actually live outside the city (as do an uncanny percentage of the users with ISP addresses), which helps to explain their interest in a place like X2O Xaviars (a great restaurant up in Westchester) as well as restaurants in midtown; they may be seeking options closest to points of entry such as Grand Central.
• We left the individual industry segments out of this analysis, but not surprisingly, they were very much clustered around midtown destinations.
• Savored employees really like dining in the West Village, probably because it’s just a hop, skip and a jump away from our “Silicon Square” headquarters

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Key Takeaways:

• Here’s our stereotype: older people (as defined by a propensity to still be using AOL, Yahoo or ISP email) are the “truth through proof” heard; they’re listening and ready to learn about your service, but they’re not ready to jump right in (whether that means purchasing quickly or telling their friends).  However, once you’ve sold them, they are often the most loyal users in your database, so don’t discount them!
• We wish more people would sign up for Savored with work email addresses – it’s abundantly clear to us that people welcome the delicious distraction of dining reservations while punching the clock.
• Quite a few people still have/use Juno email accounts.  Wow.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: one of the most exciting aspects of the Savored business model is the fact that we are able to appeal to two very different customers, namely our restaurant partners and discerning diners across the country.  That said, at our core, we remain a yield management tool for restaurants and as such, our top priority will forever be driving quality traffic to our restaurant merchants at the times when they need it most.

Accordingly, we have built our business development and marketing strategy around distribution partnerships; in other words, rather than putting a heavy focus on amassing a large list of email subscribers who may or may not ultimately transact (of course we do this to some degree – we are data-hungry marketers after all!), we have instead placed a heavy emphasis on what I like to call transaction acquisition.  To do so, we have partnered with leading brands in the industry such as Zagat and OpenTable to power their “deal” channels.  Through these partnerships, we are able to significantly expand our marketing reach, thereby improving our fill rates on the empty tables our restaurants trust us to fill.  This has been an incredibly effective approach for us to date, and a positive byproduct of the transaction acquisition strategy has been that we have freed up time to really assess and optimize our  longer-term consumer retention considerations/analytics, meaning that when we do decide to pump the gas on the membership acquisition piece, we’ll be squeezing every nickel we spend until it screams.

Savored Channel on OpenTable.com

Today I am pleased to announce our newest distribution partner, Google Offers, who will now be featuring Savored Signatures on its website, mobile app and in its email distribution to subscribers.  (For those of you who have been heads down the past few months, our Signatures platform for special events is now live in New York, San Francisco and Washington DC and will reach all ten Savored markets in the next few months.)  We are incredibly excited for the increased visibility the Google Offers partnership will provide for the Savored brand, and we believe that Google Offers’ unmatched personalization/targeting capabilities will allow us to continue to fulfill our commitment to driving value to both our restaurant partners (bringing them the “right” kind of consumer) as well as to eager diners nationwide on the hunt for special offers that resonate with their preferences.  Be sure to check out our latest Signatures on both Savored.com as well as Google Offers!

Savored Signature at Duo on Google Offers

It’s been an exciting few months here at Savored with our re-brand from VillageVines, our expansion to 10 markets, the debuts of our partnerships with Zagat and OpenTable, and countless other incremental tweaks aimed at providing both our consumer and restaurant customers with the best experience possible.

That said, today we’re pleased to announce some of our most exciting news yet: the launch of Savored Signatures, a new vertical through which our partner restaurants and other acclaimed names can market and sell uniquely-crafted experiences. Signatures made its debut to New York members via email earlier today, and the program will expand to our other nine markets over the course of the coming weeks.

Why am I excited about this new program? As always, I will dissect my sentiments from two different lenses: that of our restaurants and that of our consumers.

• Restaurants: The extension of Savored dining offers to special experiences is designed to equip our restaurants with a new marketing platform for showcasing specialties and talents that live in house. With Signatures, Savored will grow from a demand management solution to a “one-stop shop” for restaurants, enabling them to promote both reservation availability and special events to Savored’s highly qualified customer base. Throughout our evolution as a company, our number one goal has been to establish ourselves as a cost-effective high-impact marketing partner for our restaurants; our remnant “$10 for 30% off” reservations were a great start to this model and will always remain the core tenet of our business, but this new ability to service restaurant’s various ad hoc marketing needs makes today a game-changing moment for us.

• Consumers: As you probably could have guessed, our consumers love to dine out (61% of you eat at reservation-taking restaurants six or more times per month!), but they also love expanding their horizons – especially if those horizons relate to eating and drinking. Our Signatures program offers an array of opportunities that I’m confident will resonate well with you all; experiences unveiled at today’s launch include an opportunity to have Michelin-winning chef John Fraser of New York’s Dovetail prepare a five-course meal in your private home, a six-course “Japanese Oktoberfest” dinner at BONDST, a top-shelf private open bar for 10 people at Chinatown Brasserie, and an interactive mixology lab at Yerba Buena.

We’ll be rolling out new offers each week and to thank our loyal Savored customers, first access to new Signatures will be given to Savored members with reservation histories – so get busy dining today to make sure you’re first in the know!

(Friends in other cities, check back soon for offers close to home – we can’t wait for Signatures to go national!)

If you take the time to consider the corporate structures of a lot of other Internet companies out there, you’ll quickly learn that many of them have bifurcated their marketing groups into divided houses, the business-to-business side (B2B) and the business-to-consumer side (B2C).  Here at Savored, we believe that our marketing efforts should be the “perfect storm” of both worlds, so we handle it all in one place.  When I say perfect storm, I mean that in addition to providing our consumers with the most relevant and compelling content and offers, we are simultaneously in the business of helping our restaurants fill their tables with the most qualified and relevant diners – so we spend our days balancing the interests of both of these customer segments.  I’ll be sharing more detailed insights from our marketing team a few times per month via this blog, and thought an appropriate angle for this first installment would be a fun exercise I like to call Battle of the Sexes: Savored Edition.

Looking at our members by gender is just one example of something called cohort analysis, where we bucket people by similar attributes (gender, age, when they joined Savored, how they joined Savored) and track how they behave with our service.  Our gender analysis has revealed a couple of intriguing findings that we think you’ll enjoy!

1. Planning - our female customers are definitely our planners; while 28% of women book their reservations the same day as their meal, 36% of their male counterparts are guilty of this last-minute planning. From the restaurant angle, if we’re launching a new restaurant today and want to make sure we fill some tables tonight, we know we can count on the men of Savored.

How far in advance do our customers book their tables?

2. Party size – on average, our female diners tend to book tables for larger groups than our male members.  Looks like all of those last-minute reservations could be for dates (from a marketing angle, we might want to highlight some top date spots)!

3.  When we book, when we dine - interestingly, we all have a penchant for booking our reservations when we’re at work, right around 2-2:30 in the afternoon; we tend to book our upcoming reservations between Tuesday and Friday, with little planning going on Saturday through Monday.  When it comes to dining out, however, we’re (not surprisingly) all most inclined to eat out Thursday through Saturday, with our lowest volume day being Monday.

4. Age - men on Savored skew slightly older than women, with an average age of 37 (vs. 33 for females).  The verdict is still out on who’s wiser, but men do tend to be slightly better customers than females where sheer reservation volume is concerned.

5. Restaurant choices - we looked at the most popular restaurants in each market for both men and women. Believe it or not, the only cities where one single restaurant was the most popular for both groups were Chicago (MK) and Boston (Noche), meaning that in most markets, male and female preferences do differ.  That said, we all seem to be rather predictable with our loves for American and Italian cuisines.  In case you’re curious or looking for some suggestions, we’ve provided Q3′s most popular venues below:

Atlanta

• Men – Top Flr (American)
• Women – Agave (Southwestern)

Boston

• Men – Noche (Latin Fusion)
• Women – Noche (Latin Fusion)

Chicago

• Men – MK (American)
• Women – MK (American)

Denver

• Men – ChoLon Bistro (Japanese)
• Women – Sushi Sasa (Japanese)

Los Angeles

• Men – Drago (Italian)
• Women – Zengo (Latin Fusion)

Miami

• Men – Sustain Restaurant + Bar (American)
• Women – Eden South Beach (American)

New York

• Men – 10 Downing (American)
• Women – Scarpina (Italian)

Philadelphia

• Men – Victor Cafe (Italian)
• Women – Meme (American)

San Francisco

• Men – Grand Cafe (French Brasserie)
• Women – Paragon Restaurant (Californian)

Washington DC

• Men – The Prime Rib (Steakhouse)
• Women – Hill Country (Barbecue)

Hope you enjoyed pondering these insights – be sure to check back soon for more updates from our marketing team. In the meantime, check out our latest additions and make a reservation – we always want to know more about you and where you like to dine so that we can make our content are as relevant as possible!