Toast uses Appcues to directly message, hyper-segment, and deliver the right content to their customers for maximum impact. Appcues has become an integral part of Toast’s marketing programs—in some cases, generating almost 50% of the responses for their promotional campaigns.

Over the past three years, Appcues has helped Toast significantly increase their incremental annual recurring revenue (ARR) and product adoption by delivering the right message to the right user at the right time.

We sat down with Cameron Olshansky and Kendal Austin from Toast to learn how Appcues has helped them strengthen their marketing strategy.

About Toast

Toast is an all-in-one POS and restaurant management platform for businesses in the food service and hospitality space. 

As a cloud-based system built specifically for restaurants, Toast offers advanced functionality including tableside ordering, quick menu modifications, real-time enterprise reporting, online ordering, and labor management on an easy-to-use interface.

Personalized in-product messaging

Email was becoming increasingly ineffective for Toast’s marketing team—so they started looking for a solution that would allow them to personalize their messaging to customers within the product itself. They wanted to leverage the content living in their knowledge base by delivering it to their customers in real time.

In 2015, the platform started using Appcues to deliver personalized experiences to their customers. Since then, they have found several new use cases for Appcues which has made Appcues an integral part of their marketing strategy.

“Appcues allows us to meet our customers where they are, and provide that material in real time.” – Kendal Austin, Senior Marketing Manager, Toast

Targeting the right customer segments

Toast hyper-segments their customers based on hundreds of different user properties by passing user properties from their product directly into Appcues. For example, in order to optimize the user experience, they frequently use "device type" as a segment to ensure that their flows are only visible when the customers are using their desktop app.

Appcues' targeting and segmentation have also played an instrumental role in Toast’s portfolio expansion: Toast uses slideouts to put relevant content in front of very specific customers. Once a customer enters their information, Toast forwards it to their restaurant success team so that they can follow up with more questions.

Using Appcues for promotions

The Toast team also uses Appcues to promote campaigns and events. In fact, they generated 50% of their responses for a recent event through Appcues flows.

They observed that users are more likely to respond to promotions and engage with relevant content when it is placed within their in-product experience. That’s because users want to engage with content will help them succeed—and relevant, highly contextual content makes them more likely to take the prescribed action.

Building user experiences at scale

The marketing team at Toast uses Appcues every day to create in-product messaging without going through their dev cycles. This means they can build personalized experiences at scale in a matter of hours instead of weeks.

The ability to create, publish, and iterate on user experiences so quickly makes Toast’s marketing programs more effective—and their customers more successful. And it doesn’t get any bread-er than that!

"Appcues is an agile marketing solution that puts customers front and center." – Kendal Austin, Senior Marketing Manager, Toast