Uptown Network Introduces Micro Gift-Giving for Restaurants
Uptown Network, developer of the BYOM (Bring Your Own Menu) technology, unveiled interactive “micro-gifting” for its BYOM digital menu platform for restaurants. With micro-gifting, restaurant guests and online shoppers can now gift any food or beverage item or combination from a BYOM menu with a single click, delivered to the recipient as a visually engaging digital gift experience.
With BYOM Virtual Gifting, micro-gifting is as easy as sending a Tweet. Restaurant guests can package and gift an entree, perhaps linked to a selfie.
Recipients can instantly redeem gifts as delivered, or apply them to the bill for different items of their choice ordered through any of the restaurant’s delivery channels. Or micro-gifts can be saved for better times, safely stored in email on recipients’ personal devices.
Accessible Gifting
With BYOM, any size restaurant can now instantly add fully interactive digital gifting to their marketing programs without complicated infrastructure, big fees, or paperwork hassle.
BYOM Virtual Gifting creates capture-the-moment opportunities for restaurant guests and upsell opportunities for servers in the restaurant, introducing new customers to the brand and potentially resulting in larger average check sizes as they build a meal or their own experience around a gifted item. Anyone with a restaurant’s BYOM link—from regulars to “accidental tourist” foodies—can easily purchase gift experiences.
BYOM customer Titan Hospitality Group of Crofton, Maryland, is deploying BYOM Virtual Gifting across its restaurant brands, including the Blackwall Barn & Lodge, urban-chic Blackwall Hitch and the Smashing Grapes Kitchen + Wine Bar.
“BYOM has been instrumental in designing the 360-degree customer experience for our pioneering, vibrant restaurant brands,” said James King, CEO of Titan Hospitality Group. “Virtual Gifting enriches the brands’ promise and accessibility, while offering new revenue possibilities for Titan.”
“Virtual gifting is an innovative way to capture and extend our brand experience,” said Jonathan Raz, Director of Food & Beverage at the Waldorf Astoria Orlando. “It makes the entire menu giftable, so whether you are a loyal guest with a passion for our cuisine or someone experiencing one of our dishes for the first time, you’ll have the ability to share the experience with your friends and loved ones in a very visual way, with just a click. We are excited about the revenue potential virtual gifting will drive for our business. We’re pleased to have been involved as an early tester and shaper of this technology, which has great potential for the hospitality industry.”
BYOM Virtual Gifting is available today for BYOM Enterprise Edition customers and will be available in 2021 for BYOM Self-Service Edition customers.
(Watch a video here.)