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IT’S NOT HOSPITALITY IF IT ISN’T PERSONAL: LEVERAGING LOYALTY TO SHAPE THE FUTURE OF RESTAURANT MARKETING
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate technology from the customer experience in today’s fast-paced hospitality scene. Many struggling operators have said “we don’t need technology – we rely on great food and excellent service”. The fact is, this isn’t enough if operators want to stay relevant in a saturated marketplace. These days excellent service starts with technology. Consumers expect it to be part of the occasion and operators who provide that digital dimension will be the ones who come out on top.
Taking the dining experience digital
Competition is now so fierce in our industry, with innovation making the tech route so accessible that the strongest brands are emerging as those who are taking their dining digital. The possibilities technology opens up are vast, which is why we’re seeing more and more operators seeing investment in this area as a necessity.
Far from needing to think of new ways to sell an offer, operators are turning to technology to maximise profits from existing revenue streams - surely the quickest way to boost the bottom line. Key areas for refinement where technology can help include increasing average spend per head, upping the frequency of visits and transactions, reducing the cost of ingredients, ring-fencing labour costs and improving production and delivery efficiencies. Once refined, operators can then look at identifying and winning new customers. The best route to achieving much of this is down the data highway. And the easiest way to get that data is to go mobile.
Keeping up app-earances
Loyalty schemes are nothing new, and all operators should be looking to reward customers for continued loyalty. YouGov has found more than three-quarters of the UK population belong to at least one loyalty scheme but only 25% of those are with restaurant and out of home operators, compared to the sizeable 65% who surrender all their shopping habits to a supermarket.
For hospitality operators, it’s how a loyalty programme is presented that is crucial to winning and retaining a faithful customer base. Hospitality is often about lifestyle and keeping up with the latest consumer trends. Today’s sophisticated loyalty programmes give restaurant customers meaningful offers, designed to fit around their lifestyle, which means the mode of delivery needs to reflect this. Cue the app.
Model behaviour
The customer information and purchasing behaviour that operator apps provide should be the biggest influencer in a brand’s marketing strategy. Consumers are over blanket promotions and one- size-fits-all. Customer fatigue in the face of a barrage of mediocre marketing messages has seen the better brands get personal in their approach. Leveraging the data in loyalty to personalise every experience is the lynchpin in building a unique value proposition for the brand and key to capturing the consumer’s imagination to create sales opportunities.
Starbucks is a leading light in achieving these aims and uses technology as a major sales driver. Its “digital flywheel” incorporates all aspects of a seamless customer experience to drive high levels of engagement, revenue and profit growth utilising its order-ahead, payment and loyalty rewards programmes. Indeed, the order-ahead option contributed 9% of all transactions in 2017, and 30% being paid on the mobile app. The app as a whole accounted for 36% of total revenue in Q3 of the same year. Taco Bell in the US also reports a 30% jump in spend per head on mobile. The technology keeps transactions slick and frees up staff time to make every visit the best it can possibly be for a customer. The icing on the cake is the ability to use the data captured during mobile transactions to personalise promotions to a really granular degree, stirring up even greater interest and increasing sales.
The time is now
The additional bonus of a mobile loyalty app means operators benefit from location-based marketing with truly personalised push notifications sent straight to the customer’s screen to let them know for example that their favourite coffee shop is nearby and, for the next two hours, there’s an offer on their regular drink with an accompanying item they know the customer often chooses. App-based programmes also put the A-board in the customer’s pocket: algorithms that link a smartphone’s location to the local weather report, for example, enable operators to push offers to customers of a cold drink on a hot day or a cosy coffee if it’s freezing where they are. This is priceless personalisation with instant results. Investing in digital platforms that allow geo-targeting in this way is transforming the marketing landscape for savvy operators.
The combination of a physical presence and a digital layer makes brands almost irresistible. The right loyalty app offers deep customer engagement to trigger orders and generate data, all in one place for both consumer and operator. Additionally, artificial intelligence and the use of the big data these schemes collect are the immediate future for success as a hospitality operator.
The data can also be used to reimagine email marketing. Once a laborious process, technology now enables operators to automatically create hundreds of thousands of personalised email variants every week. In another example of how it’s harnessing customer data, Starbucks recently began offering real-time email offers - so highly personalised as to be almost unique. Far from the e-marketing backlash seen in the last few years, this newly intimate approach saw response rates increase three-fold.
Domino’s has famously become one of the biggest players on the digital field, and is a big advocate of personalised marketing, citing the ability not only to send the right promotions to the right household at the right time, but to direct offers to the person the company knows is the one who usually reacts and all via numerous channels, such as Apple TV, Google Home, Amazon Echo, SMS and smartwatches to name just a few. Its digital disruption of such an old-school service as pizza delivery saw online sales jump 17 percent by the end of 2017 in the UK alone and by July 2018, digital requests were making up 80 percent of total orders.
So transformational has Domino’s digital investment been, the company’s ambition is described as being not a pizza business that uses technology but “a tech company that happens to sell pizza”. These sound like bold claims for a retailer but it’s happening and other brands, big and small, can emulate this digital success using apps designed and branded specifically for their business. The key for operators is to slot in all the pieces of the personalisation puzzle to create a lifestyle enhancement customers can’t do without. Operators need to remember, an experience lives much longer in the memory than a discount, so the secret is to ensure their chosen mobile loyalty scheme does indeed enrich and personalise the experience for customers.
LOKE welcomes BL Burgers
We’ll Blame Canada for one of Sydney’s best burgers.
LOKE welcomed BL Burgers in July, within a month the process went from design, building, testing and training in-store to launching the app with over thousands of users earning points, and redeeming exclusive member deals.
LOKE’s Loyalty and rewards program provides your business a return on investment because you invest in rewarding your customers by captivating them and, they invest in redeeming rewards. The success of our loyalty and rewards program is judged on how well it helps our merchants reach higher revenues and business growth.
Pay with your phone, earn points, get free food, and redeem exclusive member deals!
Earn 10 loyalty points for every $1 you spend at BL Burgers and Loaded by BL.
You can use your points to redeem special offers or in-app credit.
With mobile payment support, you can purchase exclusive in app offers and pay in store with your phone; no cash; no cards; no worries! Its safe, secure & simple.
They'll also be rewarding you with free exclusive merch, that is only available in the App when you reach "Baller Status" and hit a total spend of $500!
BL Burgers has just launched this week's prize, download the app for your chance to win!
Written by Sonita Asahak
Loyalty and rewards will captivate new and existing customers
Loyalty and rewards will captivate new and existing customers!
Coffee Boy is a fresh and funky new coffee shop based in the UK that has four sites. The coffee scene in the UK is dominated by chains using commercial coffee. As conasiours of coffee, Coffee Boy set out to source the finest tasting and best quality coffee, filling a void in the UK coffee market. As part of their business strategy Coffee Boy sought to enhance customer experience with a dynamic loyalty and rewards program that made not only the coffee, but the rewards an incentive to seek out your local Coffee Boy location.
The Coffee Boy app offers users the opportunity to easily locate their closest Coffee Boy location and then order ahead so the coffee is ready and waiting by the time you walk in the door. For those wanting to come in and chat with the friendly staff a pay at the counter method in the app still offers the chance to earn rewards. This multi payment type feature ensures the LOKE powered app is enhancing every customers experience, will being a great promotional tool for the merchant and rewards program for the customer.
Once users have downloaded the app they can earn points for every transaction and then swap points for credit for use on their next purchase at any Coffee Boy store. Coffee Boy is able to send promotions specific to each users favourite store, or promote their stores to users in order to build multi site loyalty.
Written by Sonita Asahak
