Whether it’s grabbing a quick bite when we’re on the run, enjoying a casual meal with friends, or a fancy night on the town, Americans love to eat out. In fact, consumer spending in the restaurant sector is projected to reach over $700 billion in 2015.* For a restaurant owner, there is a lot of appeal in gaining a steady slice of that pie. As a restaurant owner, you probably understand the need for a quality Restaurant POS System, but attaining a steady, loyal customer base may seem much more nebulous and mysterious. That’s why we wanted to give you three tips on how you can build brand loyalty for your restaurant.
1. Serve Good Food at the Right Price
The number one way that you can stand out in people’s minds is by offering good food at the right price. Most customers are looking for two things: the quality and flavor of the food and value. If they think that your food is good but overpriced, they may choose to take their money elsewhere. Using restaurant accounting software, you can determine exactly what your food costs are and how your overhead affects your operational costs so that you can set your prices correctly. That means high enough for you to make a profit but low enough for people to feel like they are getting a good deal or true value.
2. Make a Connection
You may be interested to know that making an emotional connection with your customers can help create true loyalty. One way to make this type of connection is by providing fast, friendly service that helps your customers feel like welcome guests. Another consideration in creating an emotional connection with your customers is your restaurant’s ambiance. There are restaurants on almost every corner, which means that you need to stand out in order to garner customer loyalty. We can’t tell you what the right experience is for your restaurant, but you need to make sure that you have something that makes your restaurant unique. If your restaurant is just like every other eatery, there’s no reason for customers to choose your business over another one.
3. Implement a Customer Loyalty Program
Recently, we wrote a blog about the Long Term Effects of Restaurant Coupons. In that post, we mentioned that rewarding your regular customers can be more beneficial than constantly running coupons or discounts. We stand by that idea. Implementing a customer loyalty program can be complicated, but it can also be worth it. Customers who join a loyalty program tend to return to a business more often than those who don’t. But what are people looking for in a loyalty program? It’s actually pretty simple. They want a simple program that offers instant rewards, recognition, personalization, and engagement. People actually like loyalty programs because they feel like they are appreciated by the establishment. If you choose to implement a loyalty program, you’ll want to make sure that your restaurant accounting software works seamlessly with your loyalty program to make your life much easier in the long run.
Hopefully these three ideas will help you build customer loyalty in your restaurant so that you can keep serving great food for a long time to come.
*Sources:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/203358/food-and-drinks-sales-of-us-restaurants-since-1970/
https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/consumer-business/articles/second-helpings-restaurants-food-service-loyalty.html
