What is the key to effective marketing? Loyalty programs. A loyalty program is a specially designed program which rewards your best customers for remaining your best customers. Loyalty programs provide your best customers with incentives to keep coming back, often in the form of free select menu items or discounts off the top of their bill the next time they come in for a bite. Loyalty programs are often the reason why your customers choose to visit your restaurant in any given night and not your competitions, and as such they are absolutely necessary if you’re going to run a successful establishment.
So, how can you run a loyalty program? At its most basic level a loyalty program might be nothing more than knowing who your regulars are and hooking them up with the above-mentioned incentives whenever they stop by your venue. Yet this form of loyalty program is only mildly effective. There is no consistency to it. There’s no way to ensure it provides your returning customers with benefits if you aren’t there. And it’s completely unpredictable from your customer’s perspective. If a customer doesn’t know exactly what sort of incentive they will receive for visiting your restaurant then they are less likely to “roll the dice” and drop at a maximal rate.
Instead of applying the above loyalty program, you need to employ a systematized loyalty program, one which provides predictable and reliable benefits. For example, sending your customers a 20% off coupon on their birthday every year creates an incentive pattern they can predict with full assurance.
Reliability and predictability, with the occasional unexpected reward, are the keys to running a successful loyalty program.
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