From one of their modern steakhouses, Urban Farmer in Philadelphia, to the colorful flavors served up at Kachina Cantina in Denver, Sage Restaurant Concepts is nationally recognized for crafting exceptional experiences that guests can’t help but crave.

When Heather Dratler joined Sage in November 2019 as Vice President of Marketing and Brand Integrity, one of her immediate priorities was directly tying marketing efforts to revenue for all the many locations in her group. In doing so, she hoped to uncover the initiatives that drove results and those that didn’t, to help guide her team and use her resources more efficiently.

Dratler turned to OpenTable to help track returns on marketing investments across multiple channels, and provide tools to decrease workload across the growing group.

Prioritizing intuitive tools that work for them, not the other way around

When Dratler joined Sage, they used outdated marketing tools that lacked automation, segmentation, and the ability to tie metrics to efforts. Plus, various locations in the group used different tools, with little consistency.

“We looked at a variety of reservation tools that were said to have robust tracking capabilities, but OpenTable was the best for tracking more granularly at the campaign level, for the ability to create unlimited tracking links, and for integrating directly with our POS systems.”

Sage Restaurant Concepts needed greater visibility into their marketing by bringing all the right data together in an actionable view, plus providing the tools to take action for Heather and her team.

Little did Dratler know how urgent this work was, with the pandemic a few short months away and her workload about to increase. Since the pandemic, Heather shared a challenge many face: “”Not only were we constantly pivoting our operations and offerings, opening and closing locations and adjusting to ever-changing capacity restrictions that differed from state to state, as a result of an internal restructure I also added 10 new restaurants to my portfolio, and we’re continuing to open new properties as the recovery begins. With smaller teams and less resources at the property level than pre-pandemic, the scope of my role has grown exponentially.”



Setting up robust ROI tracking for marketing

With OpenTable’s relationship management solution, Dratler integrated her email marketing tool, Emma, to open up new opportunities:

“Our email marketing has really completely transformed. We now have the ability to set up automated campaigns, leveraging both the relationship management features and features within Emma itself. And we’re able to send dedicated campaigns with our branding and track ROI on those.”

We also helped Heather take marketing tracking even further beyond email with OpenTable’s marketing tracking feature to embed trackable reservation links and widgets on their websites and in their other digital channels.

The best part about it? The tracking links are specific, actionable, and endless in number.

“With OpenTable, I have the complete ability to create as many tracking links for as many channels and campaigns as I want. That has allowed us to get really granular on tracking everything that we do and say, ‘Hey, this marketing channel is working, we should focus our efforts here.’ It even helps us answer the question of, ‘when I do have budget for paid marketing, where should I put it?’ I know which channels are converting the most covers and revenue for us because of OpenTable.“

Tracking the $400k impact and more

For Sage Restaurant Concepts, robust marketing tracking has been a game changer: “Arming our teams with the ability to take these numbers back to ownership, it’s just something we’ve never been able to do before. As an organization, we went from not being able to attribute any revenue directly to marketing efforts, to attributing 9% of all revenues directly to marketing efforts within the first three months of the pandemic. We went from ‘we think’ to ‘we know’.”

In the last quarter of 2020 alone, during a pandemic no less, Dratler says, “we’ve directly attributed $410,000 of revenue to our marketing efforts because of the tracking features that OpenTable offers.”

As another added bonus, Heather and Sage Restaurant Concepts saw significant financial savings from consolidating their tools: “I was able to save our restaurants quite a bit of money just by creating a tech stack that was totally integrated and changing some of our vendors. It made a big difference.”