Restaurant Loyalty Programs: Rewarding Your Loyal Customers

Your restaurant loyalty program is your direct line to your guests. It incentivizes return patrons, as well as gives you the data to market directly to your guests. Since 75% of U.S. companies with loyalty programs generate a positive ROI, it doesn’t make any sense for your business to not have one.

Setting Up Your Loyalty Platform

Setting up a loyalty platform can be as easy as white labeling a third-party app that facilitates loyalty programs, or as complex as having your IT team build a native platform to host a custom experience, it just depends on the size of your business and your needs. Once you have a loyalty platform, the next step is to determine the tenets of your program; what rewards you want to offer and how purchases and other activities will translate towards redeeming rewards.

Driving Return Visits

Having an initial reward that excites your guests and provide value is the first step in creating a successful loyalty program to engage your guests – getting them to enroll.  And once you have their information, it is important to learn as much as you can about these guests so you can offer rewards that have meaning to keep then coming back in and continue to earn. The third step is making sure that these rewards are attainable; making the requirements too cumbersome will cause frustration to guests and they lose interest and opt-out. Finding the proper balance to maximize your rewards ROI is important, and in order to do that you have to understand what a return guest is worth to your business.

How Much Are Return Guests Worth

Obviously you have to have execute the 3 pillars well – great atmosphere, great service and great food – to have a successful restaurant.  Those are table stakes for a dining experience.  But the key is getting people to come back more often.  Even just one extra visit per year can add up.

On average, loyal customers are worth up to 10x as much as their first purchase, making it more important than ever to put an emphasis on trying to build a repeat customer base.

How Ziosk Can Help

Having a Ziosk on the table allows your guests to enroll and redeem rewards directly at the table, making it easier than ever for your guests to interact with your loyalty programs to ensure future visits. And the results speak for themselves.  The Ziosk platform increased loyalty enrollments by 372% and loyalty sign-ins by 493% for our customers. Ziosk can also integrate loyalty into other form factors like Ziosk Mini, Ziosk Virtual and Ziosk Pro – so no matter what solution fits your business, Ziosk and loyalty can work for you.  Reach out to us today to see how we can bring your loyalty program to the table.

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