Building an effective loyalty program for your restaurant should be one of your top priorities. While your standard marketing efforts will get customers in the door, loyalty programs keep them coming back for more.
Here’s four components of an effective restaurant loyalty program.
An easy sign up
When it comes to building a loyalty program, one of the most essential components is getting people to sign up for it in the first place. Customers don’t often have a high level of patience, so you won’t want to barrage them with a long sign-up form asking for their name, email, date of birth, address, etc. Keep it as simple as possible! If you don’t, then they might not even sign up in the first place.
Engagement
A loyalty program is useless unless it allows you to effectively engage your customers. The more immediate you can make your engagement, the better.
Thanks to the power of today’s digital landscape, immediate engagement is easier than ever. Hole-punch cards are a thing of the past. Digital loyalty is, by far, the easiest way to engage your customers. Taking advantage of a service like CoGoBuzz, you’ll be able to instantly engage your customers with just a simple text message. (Read ahead for more on CoGoBuzz.)
Providing real value
If your customers don’t feel like they’re getting any tangible value out of your loyalty program, then they might just end up quitting. You don’t want that.
Here’s a couple of examples highlighting good value and bad value.
Good Value: A code/coupon for 20% off your next meal! I’d consider this a quality deal because it actually creates a reasonable difference in price, without cutting too significantly into your profit margins.
Bad Value: A code/coupon for 10% off your lowest-priced dish. This deal is bad because it’s just flat-out negligible. This specific deal may be purposely bad, but it still exemplifies the point that I’m trying to make. If your deals are negligible, your customers will take notice.
Keeping the customers coming back
Creating repeat customers is arguably the most important component of a loyalty program. Repeat customers can make up a significant portion of your restaurant’s revenue – up to 71% in fact!
One of the best ways to start customers off on a loyalty program is to incentivize them with the promise of higher tiers (i.e. Bronze, Silver, and Gold Status). The more purchases a customer makes at your restaurant, the more points they get towards increasing their tier – which earns them bigger rewards.
Build Loyalty With CoGoBuzz
With CoGoBuzz, rewarding your customers becomes infinitely easier. Our affordable solution uses WiFi, SMS, and Email solutions to bring customers into your loyalty program, and engage with them to keep them coming back for more. Like I mentioned before, CoGoBuzz simplifies customer engagement down to a simple text message.
Leveraging your in-store WiFi, we’ll get you more Facebook followers automatically. Because customers login through WiFi with their Facebook profile, email, or phone number, we even produce fully realized customer profiles. Check out the rest of our website to learn more!
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Have any tips on improving loyalty programs? Let us know in the comments!