Author: Robin Johnston

If you operate a restaurant or other brick-and-mortar business, you depend a great deal on repeat customers.

It can be particularly challenging to motivate millennials to return consistently to your business. Millennials move at a fast pace and grabbing their attention can be difficult in today’s hyperconnected world.

This requires a well-conceived marketing strategy that understands their behavior and preferences. Here are some of the best ways to get more repeat business from millennials. 

The Importance of Repeat Customers

Every business owner wants loyal customers who frequently return. However, not everyone fully appreciates just how valuable such customers are.

Research indicates that repeat customers typically account for most of a business’s total revenue. Once someone is in the habit of returning to your place, you no longer have to spend as much money convincing him or her to come back.

Such customers are more likely to refer their friends to your business. These are just some of the reasons that it makes sense to prioritize your returning customers.

The Latest Trends for Millennials (and Gen Z)

Toast POS released a study in 2024 about the latest Millennial trends when dealing with restaurants. In the article, they break down:

• What are Gen Z and Millennials’ dining preferences
• How these young people view the economy and the future of dining
• Ways restaurants can attract more Gen Z and Millennial customers
• Some problems restaurants might face with these diners

Read the full article here: Gen Z And Millennial Restaurant Trends

Reach Millennials on Their Devices

The line dividing online and offline is getting thinner all the time. Today, it’s essential for brick and mortar businesses to have a website as well as social media pages.

If you want to attract millennials, it’s equally vital to connect with them on their smartphones with mobile apps, email, social media, and other online tactics. Nielsen reports that 98% of millennials between 18 and 24 and 97% between 25 and 34 own smartphones.

If you want to appeal to younger customers, you have to connect with them on the platforms they’re using.

Track Your Customers

The first step in attracting more repeat customers is to track the behavior of people who enter your business. Many businesses only know this in a casual manner, as when they recognize familiar faces.

You need a more reliable and systematic way to keep track of returning customers. One of the best ways to do this is through Wi-Fi sensor technology. Many of your customers, millennials, in particular, are likely to boot up their devices when they spend time in your space.

With Wi-Fi analytics, you can be notified whenever someone logs in using the same device more than once. This is an efficient way to measure repeat business.

Apply Triggered Marketing

Online marketers who send out emails and social media messages know the value of timing their communications. They study analytics about when people are most likely to read emails, Facebook posts, and other content.

Most marketing by brick and mortar businesses, on the other hand, doesn’t account for customers’ current locations or daily habits. A newspaper ad, for example, is read whenever the reader happens to see it.

Triggered marketing helps you increase engagement by connecting with customers at strategic moments and places. With the help of the aforementioned Wi-Fi analytics, you can encourage your young customers to return by sending them timely offers.

For example, if someone eats dinner at your restaurant every Friday night and logs into your Wi-Fi, you can send him or her a coupon for a free entree that may entice him or her to try new dishes and return more often.

If you have a salon, you might have a customer who comes in every few weeks for hair styling. Before her next appointment, you could send a coupon promoting another service such as a manicure or massage.

Observe, Measure, and Improve

If you want your millennial customers to return to your business, make sure you’re constantly looking for ways to improve.

• Analyze your data. Track all of your results, whether from your website, social media campaigns, or emails. Always look for ways to improve your results. Split test elements such as headlines, subject lines, graphics, and layouts.
• Ask their opinion. Millennials love to tell you what they think. So ask them, whether it’s on social media or printed surveys that you hand out at your business.
• Reward and loyalty programs. These are familiar techniques but still effective, especially if you offer people discounts on products they highly value.
• Practice empathic design. While traditional analytics (which, as we just discussed, you should definitely study) focuses on the internet, empathic design is about observing customers in the real world and looking for ways to enhance their experience. Could you make the layout of your cafe or restaurant more comfortable? If you have several types of chairs, which do people prefer? Could you improve the atmosphere with a different type of lighting? These and other design elements can affect customers’ behavior and whether or not they return.

Don’t underestimate the value of repeat customers. They are the bedrock of your business. Millennials are a fickle group, always looking for the latest, the best, and the hippest whether it’s coffee, beer, pizza, or fashion. If you want to attract repeat business from this group, you have to be ready to constantly up your game. {{cta(‘dd239719-d8af-4417-a078-fd3a1900337c’)}} 

When your business hosts a large event, it’s important to make the most of it. You’re spending a lot of time and money on planning and throwing this event, and you need to make sure that you are getting a good return on your investment. One way to do this is by forming a connection with attendees, and having that connection last after they leave the event. 

For this to happen, you need a way to stay in touch with attendees. Years ago, this might have meant gathering phone numbers or mailing addresses, but this is no longer as efficient. Instead, it’s better if you can connect with your visitors digitally online, giving you a way to instantly connect with hundreds – or even thousands – of people. But how to do this? 

Read more…

One of the most important business metrics is the lifetime value of customers. In short, it is the expected amount that a single customer will spend at your business during their lifetime of patronage with you. Customers with a high lifetime value tend to spend more per purchase, spend more often, and remain loyal for years. The more high-value customers you have, the better your current and future business prospects.

Acquiring these customers may take a long time. This depends on whether increasing lifetime value is an active goal and on the methods used in the customer acquisition and retention processes. However, achieving rapid improvements in customer lifetime value (CLVs) is doable with a concept that was discovered over a century ago.

What is The 80-20 Rule?

While there are many ways of stating the 80-20 rule, the most useful of these for businesses is that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your X. X can be words such as efforts, investments, employees, advertising sources, customers, etc. Your “results” with respect to customers could be sales dollars, profits, or other metrics. For example, 80% of your sales dollars will come from 20% of your customers.

To some, it might seem mysterious why the rule should work at all. But the reason is that most things are unevenly distributed. Some apple trees grow more fruit than others. Some employees are more productive than others, and some customers are more profitable. The ratio is not always 80-20 and the percentages do not always add up to 100%. Nevertheless, a minority of inputs, sometimes called the vital few, will usually have a disproportionate effect on your business. In addition, the 80-20 rule can be used to find the causes of businesses problems. For example, 80% of your customer service headaches will be caused by 20% of your customers.

Increasing Your customer lifetime value With the 80-20 Rule

Rather than dividing your resources equally between different types of marketing campaigns, let the 80-20 rule tell you which of these campaign types yields the best results. If 80% of your high lifetime value customers come from only 20% of your marketing campaigns, you should determine the commonalities between these successful campaigns. Perhaps they have a single demographic in common, or perhaps it was a specific promotion. Greater focus on this commonality will increase your marketing ROI.

For example, if a marketing email was responsible for acquiring 80% of your high lifetime value customers, you might want to commit more resources to your email marketing strategy. Note that campaigns bringing in high lifetime value customers will not necessarily bring in the most initial sales. Initial sales and CLV are different business metrics.

The 80-20 rule applications discussed so far, will efficiently increase the number of high lifetime value customers. However, you can also apply this rule to increase the lifetime value of your current best customers. If you are using a large variety of reward programs, upsells, and cross-sells to increase customer lifetime value, look for 80-20 patterns in your data.

For example, if 20% of your reward programs were responsible for most (80%) of your customer lifetime value improvements, then committing more resources to these programs and reducing resources to the other 80% is worth your while. Look for 80-20 patterns in your upsell and cross-sell data as well.

Note that the 80-20 rule works best with a large amount of data. Online sample size calculators are available for determining the minimum sample size that is statistically meaningful. The main takeaway here is that for long-term business success, you should seek to improve the lifetime value of your customers and that the 80-20 rule provides an efficient way to go about it. 80-20 patterns are (almost) everywhere. Look for them in your business data, especially when seemingly inexplicable spikes in sales or CLVs occur.

Marketing used to be a job that was at least somewhat separate from technology, but now many marketing efforts are completely dependent on technology. This has created the need for a new position at many companies: Chief Marketing Technologist (CMT). If you’re a marketing manager at a retail store or restaurant, here is what you need to know about the marriage between marketing and technology.

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Shopping for the holidays has always been a large revenue earner for retail stores. However, holiday shopping is important for other reasons. How retailers market and cater to clients for the holidays reveals important insights about effective ways to communicate with customers. Retailers and even those in the restaurant industry can learn from these trends in holiday marketing campaigns.

Employ Personalization

The best part of holiday shopping is that there is a huge demand as virtually every adult on the planet has at least one person they need to shop for. The downside is that everyone knows how valuable holiday shoppers are to businesses, so the competition is fierce. To stand out, stores focus on how they talk to clients.

This doesn’t just mean interacting with customers on social media or through emails but encompasses the way brands talk to shoppers. Retailers report success with email marketing campaigns that are simple and include a greeting and concise messages. Overall, the content must be personalized.

Email Marketing is Most Effective

While social media gets a lot of focus when talking about customer engagement, email marketing is still superior when reaching clients. 66% of those surveyed found email marketing the most effective form of advertising over online and print ads and social media. Perhaps because it feels more intimate and friendly to receive a message tailored to you than to read posts anyone can view on social media.

If you use social media, use Facebook

When talking about social media, Facebook remains king for marketing campaigns. A whopping 88% of companies surveyed invest marketing dollars into the site. In second place is Twitter with 46% investing there.

Start Early

During the holidays, the biggest revenue driver is said to be identifying and aligning seasonal marketing strategies with eCommerce promotions. Preparing promotions and marketing content early was the most helpful strategy for the holiday season for 62% of companies. Ranked less important was having a responsive mobile website. Of those who reported a profitable holiday season, only 22% had success when preparing in September or later. Of those who started prepping before September, 33% had success.

Using These Lessons

Whether gearing up for the holidays or not, topical promotional content that is also personalized makes an impact on customers. These two points can be used by retailers and restaurant owners in any season. Success requires planning early and making genuine connections with customers.

Let’s imagine a mid-priced restaurant called Hank’s Bistro. They specialize in hot soups and sandwiches, and their business often drops off in the summer when the weather turns warm. In anticipation of  the summer, they start planning early in the year and have the Bloom Intelligence Analytics Dashboard to help them.

They host a March Madness contest that ties in with basketball season and ask clients to vote on different sandwiches. The winners will go on their summer menu. During the period where clients can try the sandwiches, they sell each on a different day. They’re able to establish a baseline then view days where the Popular Visitor Time increases at lunch. This gives them two ways to gauge their efforts, through feedback and the numbers.

Hank’s advertised their contest on social media and through email. They had moderate success but are already planning how to improve their next campaign. While their contest tied in with the season, they’ve learned that it didn’t appeal much to their audience. The sensor technology has given them a demographic breakdown and shown that middle aged women are their core audience. Their next effort has to appeal more to this group.