Client: Black-eyed Pea Restaurants (Hospitality & Casual Dining) 

Primary Tools: POS, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Zapier 

Black-Eyed Pea Restaurants had the guest relationships — what they lacked was a system to remember them. Visit history lived in the POS, email lived in Mailchimp, and the two never spoke. Birthdays went unacknowledged, lapsed guests went un-re-engaged, and the marketing team was spending hours manually reconciling data across platforms that had no reason to be separate. The opportunity was clear: connect the systems, automate the moments that matter, and let the guest experience speak for itself. 

Fragmented Data & Missing "Celebration" Revenue

Fragmented Guest Data: Guest information lived in multiple systems (reservations, events, email platforms), resulting in duplicate contacts and incomplete guest profiles.

Missed Lifecycle Opportunities: High-value milestones, specifically guest birthdays, were not being leveraged for personalization or repeat visits.

Inconsistent Follow-Ups: Post-visit outreach and re-engagement efforts were manual and inconsistent across different brand locations.

The Architecture: A Closed-Loop POS-to-CRM Integration

I designed a closed-loop system to establish HubSpot as the Single Source of Truth for all guest data. By integrating Toast POS directly into the CRM, I turned raw visit behavior into actionable marketing intelligence.

Automated Data Capture: Using Zapier as the integration layer, new or updated reservations in Toast automatically created or updated contact records in HubSpot.

Real-Time Visit Logic: The system captured visit frequency, recency, and specific brand locations visited to build a comprehensive guest history.

Smart Field Mapping: I mapped the Toast Birthday field to a HubSpot date property, allowing the system to monitor guest milestones without manual intervention.

Execution: Automated Guest Journeys (The Birthday Loop) 

With a unified data flow established, I focused on retention by building multi-step automated journeys that responded to guest behavior in real-time.

The Anticipation Trigger: Exactly 7 days before a guest’s birthday, the system triggers the first "Special Offer" email.

Engagement-Based Branching: I used Mailchimp’s Customer Journeys to implement conditional logic:

If Email Opened: The guest received a "Gift" follow-up and a call-to-action to make a reservation. If No Engagement: A "Birthday Nudge" was sent after a 3-day delay to ensure the offer was seen.

Dynamic Content: Personalization tags were used to ensure every message included the guest's name and favorite restaurant location.

Measurable Impact 

Centralized Data: Established a single view of every guest across all brands, eliminating manual data entry and duplicate records.

Increased Retention: Recovered lapsed guests and increased repeat visits by 22% through automated re-engagement and birthday flows.

Operational Efficiency: Saved roughly 10 hours per week by automating the sync between Toast POS and Mailchimp execution.

Stronger Engagement: Maintained 40%+ open rates on birthday journeys, outperforming standard retail benchmarks.

Closed-Loop Attribution: Every campaign click-through feeds back into HubSpot to update guest segments and refine future messaging.

The birthday automation alone drove a measurable lift in covers during traditionally slower weekday periods, with guests actively citing the offer when making reservations.

By shifting Black-eyed Pea Restaurants’ email program from fragmented, manual outreach to a structured guest lifecycle system, email and CRM became a reliable revenue engine instead of an administrative burden—supporting both brand loyalty and consistent foot traffic without adding operational complexity.

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Hospitality brands already have the data they need to drive retention — it's usually just stuck in a POS that doesn't talk to anything else. The work here wasn't complicated in concept, but it required careful integration logic, clean field mapping, and behavioral branching that actually reflected how guests make decisions. If your restaurant or hospitality brand is sitting on visit data that isn't driving repeat business yet, that's a solvable problem. Let’s connect on LinkedIn