You’ve set the scene for success. You have perfected your menu, you have streamlined online ordering system and live table booking systems in place and you couldn’t have picked a more perfect location for your restaurant if you’d tried. But the big question remains. How do you earn customer loyalty and convince your customers to keep returning to your restaurant as opposed to choosing their favourite take-out place down the street?
In a landscape saturated with dining options, it's imperative to not only attract but also retain patrons who will choose your establishment time and again.
In this blog post, we'll delve into five indispensable strategies that can transform occasional diners into loyal advocates for your restaurant. From leveraging loyalty programs to harnessing the power of social here are 5 days you can keep customers coming back for more.
5 Ways Restaurants Can Earn Loyal Customers:
1. Loyalty Points
There’s no stuff like free stuff, right? Offering perks to your customers can have a large impact on your restaurant's success. Give your customers a loyalty point card, and each time they return, swipe it to add loyalty points. Once they reach a certain amount of points on their card, you can give them various options on how to redeem their loyalty prize. For example, you could offer them a free dinner for two (to a certain value), a free appetiser or dessert, or they could redeem the value amount as a voucher and gift it to a friend to help spread the word! 3S POS electronic point of sale system includes a loyalty and promotions management tool. That allows you to easily manage your customer loyalty schemes, by controlling how your customers earn their points, the currency value of a point and how it can be redeemed.
2. Keeping track on review sites
Technology has the benefit of appealing to a wider range of demographics, especially millennials. A surprisingly high rate of customers turns to social media for reviews and first-hand recommendations on restaurants. By keeping up with your score and responding to reviews, both good and bad can help you go a long way. By engaging on review sites and rewarding customers who have left positive reviews with a voucher or discount deal, you will not only gain that customers loyalty, but expose yourself to all other visitors who read that review.
3. Make social media your best friend
Staying on the topic of social media, it would be detrimental to your business to avoid staying ahead of the social media game. Create targeted campaigns for your customer niche. Reach out to customers who share positive feedback about your brand. And incorporate their messages as part of your marketing campaign. Allow your followers to promote your business page by having a “fan food of the week” contest. Whereby they take pictures of themselves enjoying their favourite meal in your restaurant and let their friends and followers have the vote. Offer the winner a free meal or bottle of wine the next time they visit your restaurant. 3S POS allows you to create targeted customer marketing emails. Which can be fully personalised and filtered according to target customer groups. You can accurately monitor the uptake of any offers with voucher codes and automate the timing of marketing communications.
4. Integrate data management
All marketing begins and ends with customer data but many don’t know how to use it effectively. The more you know about your customers, the more you learn about your business and how to improve it. With the 3S POS customer relationship management tool, you can reward customers, see their spending habits. And also customise offers to keep them coming through the door. You can also capture the following data from your customers:
Customers' Data
- Customer Contact Details – store customers personal and preferred contact details
- Customer Types – assign customer types for special discounts, marketing and loyalty schemes
- Multiple Delivery Addresses – allow customers to have multiple delivery addresses rather than creating multiple accounts
- Customer Accounts/Loyalty – see customer loyalty points, credit limits and deposits
- Customer Preferences – store customer allergies, marketing preferences and likes/dislikes
- Previous Customer Purchase History – see customers history of purchases and preferred orders
Restaurants that take the time to integrate these systems will have much better data on customer engagement.
5. Focus on convenience
In addition to all of the customer-facing technologies that can be used to build loyalty, it’s important that you cover all your bases behind the scenes too. The 3S POS EPOS system not only allows customers to make telephone and online food orders. But can also cleverly manage how tables can be combined with min and max covers to allow you to manage your bookings as smoothly as possible. All in real-time and with minimum human input.
You will be amazed by the power that these 5 simple tactics will have on your customers. Remember to always reward your customers for being loyal and not only will they keep on coming. But they will be more likely to share their thoughts on your brand with their offline and online communities. Which will help bring you more loyal customers.