Restaurants loyalty programs reward loyal customers while encouraging repeat business and improving service. In the restaurant business, repeat customers are crucial to success. The majority of a restaurant's revenue comes from just a small portion of current customers.
In other words, your regulars probably make up the bulk of your revenue.
Restaurant reward programs can keep loyal customers coming back for more, and in turn, keep your establishment open for business.
7 Tips for Managing Restaurant Loyalty Programs
If you're in the beginning stages of launching a restaurant loyalty program or want to improve your current program, these tips can help you better manage your rewards program.
1. Launch a Loyalty App
We're living in an increasingly mobile world. Today's consumers expect to be able to sign up for and redeem rewards from loyalty programs using their mobile devices.
A loyalty program app will allow customers to sign up for your program, keep track of their progress and redeem their rewards right from their smartphone. Many customers prefer using mobile coupons because they don't have to worry about forgetting or losing their coupon. Everything they need is right there on their smartphone.
Loyalty apps benefit customers, but they also benefit restaurants. Rewards program apps provide restaurants with valuable customer data. Using the data from your customer rewards app, you can learn more about your regulars and their preferences.
The more you know about your customers, the better you're able to provide a personalized experience.
There are quite a few companies that offer loyalty apps for restaurants. Their solutions eliminate the need to have a custom-built loyalty application (which can be expensive) and typically allow you to brand your app for a personalized experience.
2. Keep Your Restaurant Reward Program Simple
Customers shouldn't have to jump through hoops just to participate in your restaurant loyalty program. Keep things as simple as possible to make your program user-friendly.
Customers should be able to quickly and easily:
- Sign up for your program, either through a loyalty rewards app or web browser
- Track their progress and/or points
- Redeem rewards with the tap of a button
Make it simple for customers to earn points, and explain how the reward system works. If customers don't understand how to sign up or redeem rewards, they're not going to participate.
Loyalty platform providers can help you with loyalty program management and also make it easy for customers to participate. Unless you have an idea for a unique point-earning system or need something truly customizable, it's typically more practical to use a rewards platform that eliminates the time and expense of developing a custom solution.
3. Focus on Loyalty Program Marketing
You can have the best loyalty program in the business, but you won't get the results you want if your customers don't know about it. Loyalty marketing is crucial to the success of a restaurant rewards program.
Make sure that you're promoting your rewards program via:
- Social media
- Your website
- Advertisements
If you're advertising through direct mail, radio, television or print, make sure that you're promoting your loyalty program through these channels as well. The key is to raise awareness so that customers can easily learn about and sign up for your loyalty program.
4. Reward Every Visit
The most successful loyalty programs for restaurants reward customers on every visit. Customers are more likely to dine at a restaurant where they're already a member of a loyalty program, especially if they know they'll earn points each time they visit.
Customers want to feel like they're working towards achieving a goal. Rewarding each visit can achieve this, but it's important not to go overboard. The key is to find a balance. You don't want to give away free food with every other visit, but you don't want customers to feel like they'll never earn anything.
Finding that sweet spot can be challenging, but you can use POS data to estimate how many points the average customer would earn on each visit. This can help you define your point system so that customers are rewarded regularly but not too frequently.
5. Reward Loyal Customers with Personalized Experiences
Today's consumers want personalized experiences. Yes, they love discounts and savings promotions, but they equally value personalized rewards, such as receiving a free dessert or appetizer on their birthday.
The more personalized the experience, the better.
Many popular reward programs combine both a points-earnings system and personalized incentives, such as birthday rewards.
To provide personalized rewards, you'll need customer data. Gathering customer data can be a tricky area, but there are a few things you can do to get the data you need, including:
- Profile completion rewards: Customers earn points for filling out their profiles, which may ask for their: gender, birthday, location, age, etc. Customers are willingly providing this information in exchange for points, which will get them closer to redeeming rewards.
- Quizzes and interactive activities: Interactive quizzes and activities can also help you learn more about your customers. These types of activities can help you learn more about customer preferences and habits, which will ultimately help you offer personalized rewards and suggestions.
Some loyalty programs ask customers to provide personal information at the point of sign-up, but they are transparent about the information they ask for. Customers also understand that providing some information like their birthdays will provide them with a reward (e.g. a free item or discount).
6. Make Sure Staff Understands the Program
Promotion is crucial to the success of a restaurant loyalty program. With a little training and education, your staff can assist in the promotion of your program. It's important for your staff to understand the purpose of loyalty programs, how your program works and how it benefits the customer.
If a customer is already a member of your program, employees can explain the benefits of visiting more often to redeem rewards more quickly. If a customer isn't a member, your staff can help with the sign-up process, talk about how the program works and discuss the benefits. Providing an incentive to sign-up on the spot, such as a 10% discount, makes it hard for customers to resist and less uncomfortable for staff to promote the program.
If you want your staff to promote your program, they must understand:
- The rewards structure of your program. Do customers earn points for each dollar they spend, or do they get rewarded with a free item after so many visits?
- How rewards are sent out and redeemed.
- How the app or rewards platform works from a customer's perspective. This way, they can answer questions and possibly assist with sign-ups.
- How to answer questions and handle customer objections to signing up.
- The most common questions about the program and how to answer them.
7. Measure Your Success
What do you hope to achieve with your loyalty program? If you're like most restaurant owners, you want to increase your repeat customer base. Knowing your goals, no matter what they are, will help you measure your success.
If you don't know your goals, you can't possibly know if your rewards program is succeeding.
Loyalty program platforms can help you measure your success by offering tracking tools and data that will help you understand your program's performance.
If you find that your loyalty program is too much to handle on your own, there are loyalty program management companies that can help.