The old sales adage: the least expensive customer to find is the one you already have is repeated so often because it is profoundly true. Your existing customers already know who you are and what you do; the quickest way to increase revenue is to get them to come to your restaurant more often, and to spend more at each visit.
Easier said than done? Not necessarily.
If you check out The Loyalty Effect, you’ll find that
Building loyalty with 5% more customers leads to an increased average profit per customer of between 25% and 100%.
You already have customers; how do you get them to be more loyal? How do you get them into your restaurant more often, and when there, to spend more money?
In order to implement the different strategies to make each action occur, you have to understand some of the psychology behind what drives consumers to spend. First, let’s look at higher spending per visit. Many retailers have yet to grasp the fact that the further their customer is from their own cash, the more likely they are to spend more of it.
People are more likely to spend on a card than if they’re physically taking hard cash out of their pocket. Furthermore, when the money has already been spent, i.e. a prepaid card, they are even more likely to spend more – usually 20% – per visit. Therefore, it should be one of your primary missions to increase the amount of money loaded onto your customer’s loyalty card, either by gift card sales or reloading existing loyalty cards.
Next, you need to increase frequency of visits. How do you make a customer want to come to your restaurant more often?
One way of getting them in the door again is to increase the amount of money loaded on their loyalty program by rewarding them for loading the points, and rewarding them again for using their prepaid cards; this way they are getting double rewards and feel like a VIP.
You can also offer promotions to loyalty members based on their purchasing habits. If you create a promotion for a product that you know your customer already likes, they WILL walk in the door. Using a mobile payment solution that tracks your customers’ purchasing habits makes this easy to determine. Think about this fact:
90% of members want to receive communications from loyalty programs.
Offering limited time promotions also helps drive traffic by creating a sense of urgency; the shorter the better, and you can target slower days. If your QSR is in a mall, make the short term offer for Monday through Thursday. For street facing stores where foot traffic is minimal during the weekend, make your offer run from Thursday to Sunday.
Now that you have clear two goals: to increase the frequency of visits and dollars spent per visit, and a plan to achieve them, you need to get your message to your customer. In order to do that you need to reach your customers where they’re at, which may be via email, social media, store signage, or directly through a mobile loyalty app, and if they’re members of your loyalty program already, we know they’ll be receptive.
If you would like to talk to us about setting up a mobile loyalty program, please get in touch.