Friday, July 11, 2014

How to Surprise and Delight Loyal Customers

Rewarding your loyal customers through a Surprise and Delight program can bring more sales and profit into your restaurant. Honoring your faithful customers motivates them and makes them increase their patronage.

Your occasional customers will respond to your Surprise and Delight programs when they receive a substantial reward for coming back more often. These customers will appreciate a unique and valuable gift more than free food and drinks. Through a mobile loyalty program, you can gather adequate information to find out what they like and use it to bring them back to your restaurant. Here are some effective ways to build a successful surprise and delight program.

Status-based Incentives. Some occasional users respond very well to prestige and special treatment that differentiates them from other customers. For instance, the opportunity to “become a Gold member and get an Amuse Bouche every time you come in” is a nice way to do this. In fact, you can take this to the extreme by allowing people to become Platinum members after making a purchase worth $1000. Any one in this category will enjoy special seats and have access to a special collection of wines.

Personal recognition. iBeacon now enables restaurants to recognize and address their customers by their names as soon as they come in. Virtually everyone appreciates this personal touch. Building up such personal relationships makes customers feel very important.

Rewards for Referrals. Reward all the customers that act as ambassadors of your brand by referring new customers to the restaurant. In fact, there are social media apps that track referrals and allow you to know your loyalists. Anytime someone refers another person to you, reward them with a discount on their next purchase. Then they will gladly inform more people about your service.

Use incentives to promote ordering online. It has been discovered that customers spend more when they order goods online. So use double loyalty points to entice your customers to order on the web. It will reduce orders by phone and make your operations easier.

Random selection of winners. A sandwich chain has attracted more patronage by picking customers at random and rewarding them with a free sandwich. The chance of collecting a free gift will make several occasional visitors to return to try their luck.

Offer surprise gifts. Instead of publicizing a reward program, you can add an element of surprise. For instance, you can surprise your customers by giving unexpected special treatment or offering them a special gift. Since they are not expecting it, it helps you to keep things fresh and spontaneous. Thus you please your customers more by surprising them.

Although your goal is to please every customer, what pleases one customer may displease another. Hence, the most effective way of finding out what pleases each customer is through a mobile loyalty program. This will give you detailed feedback from your guests in real time. The details provided can then be used to adapt your promotions to increase patronage from occasional users.

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