Winning a new customer can cost five times more than it costs to retain an existing one. What’s more, even a small increase in customer retention – say 5 percent – can boost profits anywhere from 25-95 percent. Taking the best benefits of your technology and reinforcing them with strong interpersonal customer service skills can help you cement the loyalty of the guests who are already coming to you. Your guest data is your best asset, so analyze it and create opportunities to collect more of it – through your loyalty program, as well as through tech-based ordering and payment. When your Customer Relationship Management system is integrated with your POS, you’re better able to address repeat customers by name, pull up their preferred dishes and table location, and elicit regular survey responses from them to identify their likes and dislikes, as well as your own opportunities for improvement. But this information is even more powerful when it is blended with more anecdotal input from staff who interact with your guests. Your team can tag a guest as a VIP, a wine connoisseur or as someone who enjoys the best of what you offer, giving you extra intelligence to make the person’s visit special. Taking better care of your best customers is also likely to result in their sending their friends and family your way – so you may end up winning new customers anyway.

​Whether you’re participating in a Restaurant Week or developing other events designed to draw traffic during normally slower periods this season, now is a good time to fine-tune your loyalty program. It can help you capture the higher volume of guest data coming to you and turn an occasional guest into a regular one. What’s more, it may help you ride out otherwise challenging market conditions. Paytronix research found that loyalty program members were responsible for a larger proportion of total sales after the onset of the pandemic, and that the top 10 percent of loyalty guests were responsible for more than half of all spending for eight months in 2020. Further, according to Waze, 40 percent of consumers feel their participation in a restaurant loyalty program would encourage them to spend more on their food orders. But at a time when consumers are receptive to loyalty programs, it can also be difficult for restaurants to make their program stand out. To do so, focus on deeper personalization. That could mean using Bluetooth technology to automatically identify a loyalty program member and pull up their most recent orders, introducing a gaming promotion to drive traffic during certain periods, or simply rewarding customers with more of what you know they love. Dunkin Donuts, for one, sends “Year in Review” emails to its DDPerks members based on their yearly purchases and activity. It’s simple and it brings people back.

As restaurants look for new ways to boost guest loyalty and ensure steady traffic in 2022, subscription offers have become more commonplace. Brands including Panera, Pret A Manager and Taco Bell have all extended subscription offers to guests – and now Sweetgreen is testing a $10 subscription offer that allows guests to get $3 off their orders within 30 days of their subscription purchase. Forbes reports that the offer is the latest phase of Sweetgreen’s initial loyalty program, launched over five years ago, which rewarded customers with $9 in credit for every $99 they spent in restaurants or on the app -- a program more akin to the punch-card loyalty programs of the past. Subscription offers are worth considering because they may keep a brand more front-of-mind for guests at a time when restaurants need the assurance of steady traffic. Each month, the guest is reminded that there is value in returning to you. At the same time, each of their return visits can yield helpful data that allows your business to craft future offers to that guest – data you would not have if you simply issue a blanket discount after the guest reaches a purchasing threshold not connected to details about their past purchasing behavior. What items on your menu tend to bring customers back? Does your coffee attract people on their morning commute? Does your soup-and-sandwich combo generate reliable lunchtime traffic? Or perhaps there are profitable parts of your menu that you’d like guests to support more steadily. These could all be areas worth testing with a subscription offer.

Gift cards are a front-of-mind gift-giving option for a vast number of U.S. consumers. The gift card market is worth more than $160 billion and it has been growing by double-digit margins since 2015 – and gift card purchases have been a means of paying restaurants forward during the pandemic. But according to a new study from Incisiv, restaurants are still leaning on old-school tactics when it comes to managing their gift card sales instead of harnessing the data-driven power they can offer. By better connecting gift cards to loyalty programs, restaurants can capitalize on the special occasions that inspire guests to use these cards – occasions that happen to be predisposed to generating feelings of loyalty. The study advises restaurants fine-tune their approach to gift cards in four areas: First, make gift cards a more frictionless experience for guest and employee alike. That means considering such actions as how to minimize the steps/people involved in processing a transaction, or if you can add a gift card balance to a third-party wallet or loyalty account, for example. Second, make it possible to purchase, transfer, redeem and reload gift cards across all of your purchasing channels. Third, make it more personal – like so much of the experience of dining out, customization of restaurant gift cards helps drive loyalty. Do you offer a range of designs for a range of occasions? Sample messages? Can a giver include a special video message or photo? Finally, make recommendations. Suggesting products based on the occasion and the recipient can help you upsell your cards, as well as generate data that can improve your ability to segment and target your customer base going forward.

Restaurant digital orders skyrocketed 124 percent in March over the same period in 2020, according to NPD Group. That spike resulted in an influx of new restaurant loyalty programs in the market over the past year. Now a number of brands are revamping their existing programs in order to fine-tune their approach to their loyal guests – and enhance their actionable data as a result. As CNBC reports, some of those changes include improving the number or the quality of rewards for guests, expanding the number of payment options (including cash), and incorporating technology that recognizes a guest as soon as they enter the drive-thru or front door, enabling staff to greet the person by name and call up their preferences before they say a word. Others are providing loyalty program members with information on how many rewards they have earned in the past year. To be sure, as more of these programs enter the market, it will become harder for them to stand out – but it also means consumers will come to expect some rewards customized to their preferences in exchange for their regular business at restaurants.

Chances are you have some kind of loyalty program at your restaurant – and if you have graduated past the little plastic loyalty cards carried on keychains, you might think your program is doing okay. But have you studied exactly how well it’s helping you turn a new customer into a loyal one? Are you able to assess large amounts of data and translate that into targeted promotions that reach customers at just the times when they’re most likely to respond? According to a recent podcast on Pizza Marketplace with Tom Byrnes, vice president of marketing at LedgerPay, most loyalty programs aren’t succeeding. Research from Deloitte found that the average loyalty app loses 95 percent of its active user base within 90 days of it being downloaded, so most restaurant loyalty programs are engaging only a small portion of their customer base. Still, loyalty programs, when done right, are worthwhile: It’s nine to 11 times more expensive to recruit a new customer than to retain an existing one, so having a loyalty program that attracts and continuously engages new members is paramount. Your program should allow you to not only collect consumer data but to easily slice and dice it in a meaningful way. When you create a promotion for a subset of your loyalty program members, you should be able to readily find out how many people took you up on it, for instance – and how that offer’s response rate and profits compared to the promotion you sent them last month. How well does your program deliver for you?

Takeout is here to stay (and even if you’re eager to serve a full dining room again, you have reason to be happy about the takeout part). The proof is in the numbers. According to a new survey of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers by Paytronix Systems, 63 percent of the money that U.S. consumers spent on food orders last year was on food eaten at home. Digital channels supported those orders by a large margin: Of the money consumers spent online on food orders, 89 percent was spent on orders placed via desktop websites, mobile apps and aggregator apps. What’s more, the research found that consumers spent 50 percent more on average when they placed orders online for takeout. Paytronix CEO Andrew Robbins says that in 2021, a consumer’s ability to order online, collect orders via a drive-thru or curbside pickup, and earn rewards through loyalty programs will create the most opportunities for restaurants. This makes it all the more critical to be able to use your POS to quickly summon information about what your recipes cost, which menu items deliver the most profitability, and what items a guest has ordered in the past. If your restaurant receives a grant from the American Rescue Plan, consider using it to fine-tune your tech to streamline your takeout so you can suggest the profitable items and combinations that a guest is most likely to crave time and again.

We’re living in an era of personalization. A whopping 91 percent of consumers are more likely to support brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them, according to Accenture research. Before the pandemic, restaurant operators might have been able to identify their most loyal guests as they walked in the door. Technology – while important and helpful – wasn’t necessarily critical to keeping track of what loyal guests liked. Now, it’s clear that technology is needed to track customer preferences and deliver the promotions they want when they want them. This will be especially true as ghost kitchens become more common and guests have less face-to-face interaction with brands. But if brand personalization capabilities sound more feasible for the likes of Starbucks or Panera than for smaller independents, look for that to change soon. Brightloom, the new incarnation of Eatsa, the chain of popular fast-casual restaurants that used robots to prepare salads, is now focused on helping smaller businesses slice and dice their data into actionable information that can be used to build personalized marketing campaigns. (The company has some firepower behind it: Brightloom’s CEO came from Starbucks, where he helped develop the brand’s loyalty rewards program, and mobile order and pay capabilities, among other resources.) Competing businesses are developing similar capabilities, so look for tech-driven personalization to become more accessible for all.

Do you remember what your marketing plan looked like from last year at this time? Chances are if you reviewed it today, it would look pretty quaint, considering the countless ways operators have had to reinvent business this year. While the development of a vaccine has provided signs of hope for 2021, the winter season will still require operators to rethink the ways they appeal to their customers. Your breakfast and lunch menus may hold some untapped potential here. For many people this winter, dining out in the evening could be a non-starter if eating outside is their only option. At the same time, the pandemic has also changed lunch from being a quick break in the day to a welcome chance to reconnect with colleagues and get out of the house – particularly for the large swaths of people who continue to work from home. How can you rethink your winter promotions to help capitalize on those changes in our habits? Can you draw people out for a hot lunch outside or entice loyal customers with a lunch delivery subscription? Could you offer a special menu of specialty coffees, breakfast burritos or grab-and-go breakfast items a person could collect following their morning run or school drop-off? Even snack times have new potential this year. The increased numbers of people working from home – and experiencing more blurred boundaries between work and life – may result in guests being more open to picking up a late lunch or meeting a friend for a late-afternoon appetizer. How have the habits of your most loyal guests changed this year? Keep them in mind as you plan for what could be another few unpredictable months ahead.

Does your loyalty program look different now than it did in February? It should. The kinds of promotions that were central to your loyalty program back then – along with your method of operating your program – might come across as inappropriate now. It’s especially critical that you’re using your loyalty program to fuel the parts of your business that need support in the current environment and to collect information about how, when and what your customers are ordering. This will help you to keep business coming in now and provide a more secure bridge to operating post-pandemic. So what do you want people to know about your restaurant? In what areas of your business do you want to build awareness and generate more sales? Your loyalty program is a great vehicle for directing customer focus. Incentivize people to place their order via your website or app and pick it up curbside. Integrate contactless payment with your loyalty program so you’re automatically generating data (and at a time when safety is the new hospitality, also ensuring your guests don’t have to swipe a physical card to earn points). Increase the appeal of your program by creating joint offerings with partner businesses and offering more flexible terms. Stay in contact through email and social media – posting daily on social media is important for awareness right now – and make sure to promote your safety practices.