• Restaurant Marketing

Maximize Your Revenue: The Secret to Re-engaging Lost Guests

by: Allen Graves
5 min read

Are you concerned about losing your restaurant guests to your competition? In times of dwindling consumer spending, it is vital to keep your patrons coming back for more.

For the discerning restaurant owner, the loyalty of your guests is the cornerstone of your success. Ensuring that every diner, from the regulars to the first-timers, leaves with the intent to return, is critical.

However, the reality of unvoiced dissatisfaction can lead to a gradual erosion of your customer base, a detail that can easily go unnoticed amidst the hustle of a successful service.

Envision a bustling evening at your venue: the team is in perfect sync and you’re personally ensuring that the diners’ experiences are up to par.

Yet, an unaddressed issue, such as an overcooked steak at a single table, can result in a guest deciding to leave quietly and not return.

This scenario, seemingly insignificant on a busy night, can compound over time.

Consider the cumulative effect of losing one patron each day over a year — if your dining room seats 365 guests, that’s an entire dining room that could have ramped up revenue and improved your customer lifetime values.

It equates to a significant number of lost opportunities for repeat business and word-of-mouth promotion, which are invaluable to your establishment – not to mention the direct revenue loss.

As an owner, recognizing the gravity of these silent departures and taking proactive steps to capture feedback and rectify issues promptly is essential.

It’s not just about preserving the present ambiance but also about securing the future prosperity of your restaurant.

Re-engaging Lost Guests

How to Identify Churning Guests

To effectively re-engage guests who have drifted away from your restaurant, a strategic approach is essential, especially in an industry where personal recognition of every patron is virtually impossible.

For businesses like eCommerce or subscription services, tracking customer churn is a straightforward process involving simple data analysis.

Restaurants, however, face a unique challenge. The transient nature of diners, including local regulars, occasional visitors, and tourists, makes it difficult to track individual patron visits and build lasting loyalty.

Relying on traditional methods to gauge customer churn often leads to imprecise results for restaurants.

This is where solutions like a restaurant customer data platform become invaluable.

By leveraging today’s technology, you can accurately track, analyze, and understand your guests’ behaviors, transforming this data into actionable strategies to win back lost guests and foster enduring relationships.

Attracting lost guests back to your restaurant requires more than just a great menu, ambiance, and service. It demands a deep understanding of guest behaviors and patterns.

Bloom Intelligence provides a robust solution, harnessing data from sources like your guest WiFi access and online ordering system, to bring this insight directly to you.

Even without guests logging into your WiFi, Bloom Intelligence can detect their presence simply by their proximity to your WiFi network. These capabilities enable you to track both on-site and online guest visits with precision, giving you a clear picture of guest frequency and patterns.

Using WiFi access to re-engage lost guests

With Bloom’s advanced analytics, you gain access to key performance indicators that paint a detailed picture of your guests’ behaviors. This includes tracking how often they visit and any changes in their visiting patterns.

The platform translates this complex data into straightforward graphical representations, making it easy to understand and act upon.

A critical metric provided by Bloom is the trend analysis of your churn rate. Bloom’s intelligent algorithms assess each guest’s visit frequency, both individually and collectively, to calculate the likelihood of their return within a specific timeframe.

When a guest is predicted to be at risk of churning – not returning within the expected timeframe – you are empowered to take action.

Bloom’s automated marketing suite enables you to design and automatically deploy tailored campaigns, targeting these at-risk guests with incentives that encourage them to revisit your restaurant and re-establish their loyalty.

This proactive approach turns data into a powerful tool for re-engaging lost guests, ensuring the continued success and growth of your establishment, even with dwindling consumer spending.

Waiter Re-engage lost guests

Taking Action With Churning Guests

Revitalizing your customer base and enticing guests back to your restaurant can be as simple as crafting a compelling message, possibly offering an incentive like a complimentary drink or appetizer.

When a guest is identified as potentially drifting away, the system automatically dispatches your personalized message to them.

This strategy has been successfully adopted by restaurant owners using Bloom nationwide, yielding significant growth and retention results.

Take, for example, a restaurant chain in Florida. By implementing an at-risk guest campaign, they have remarkably welcomed back almost 38% of these guests. Moreover, they experienced a consistent decrease in their attrition rate since the campaign’s inception.

For a detailed insight into this success story and to understand the diverse range of campaigns that Bloom’s platform can facilitate, you are encouraged to download and review the full report.

This showcases just a fraction of the potential that Bloom’s targeted, intelligent marketing strategies can unlock for your restaurant.

Guide to winning back lost guests

In Conclusion

Harnessing the power of data-driven platforms like Bloom Intelligence is more than a technological advancement for restaurants, it’s a transformative approach to guest retention and business growth.

By effectively identifying and re-engaging guests at risk of churning, restaurant owners can not only recover potentially lost revenue but also strengthen the loyalty of their customer base.

The success stories from various restaurants across the country underscore the significant impact of targeted, automated marketing campaigns in bringing back lost guests.

Implementing these strategies, backed by insightful data and intelligent analytics, positions restaurants to not only thrive in a competitive market but also to build a foundation of loyal patrons who feel valued and understood.

This approach is not just about salvaging lost opportunities – it’s about creating a sustainable and flourishing business model that resonates with the needs and preferences of every guest who walks through your doors.

Discover Bloom Intelligence

Bloom Intelligence is an AI-powered restaurant marketing platform that includes a powerful customer data platform, automated data collection, marketing automation, and reputation management tools.

Guest data is collected from many different sources and aggregated into one single platform, making it simple and easy to analyze and segment your restaurant’s guest personas for your restaurant digital marketing.

Data is collected from sources like WiFi logins, online reservation systems, online ordering platforms, POS systems, website forms, social media and more.

Bloom makes guest data collection effortless, allowing you to quickly execute the strategies listed above, saving you time, increasing customer lifetime values, attracting new guests, improving your reputation, and boosting your bottom line.

Click Here to Schedule a Free Online Demo, or call 727-877-8181 to see how we can help you save time and drive tangible results for your restaurants.


Restaurant Marketing FAQs

What is Restaurant Marketing?

Restaurant marketing is the process of getting people to visit your restaurants. Restaurant marketing creates loyalty, provides data to research, analytics, and allows restaurants to gain a better understanding of their ideal customer profile. It utilizes all customer channels: guest WiFi, website, social, rating sites, mobile apps, email, text, and advertising.

Learn More About Restaurant Marketing Here

What is WiFi Marketing?

WiFi marketing is a marketing technique that uses guest WiFi to collect & clean customer data such as names, emails, phone numbers, customer behavior, and demographics. This data is used to personalize marketing campaigns to increase customer loyalty, build online reviews, and save at-risk customers. The performance of every campaign can be tracked down to the tangible ROI of a customer walking back in your door.

Learn More About WiFi Marketing Here

What is Restaurant Reputation Management?

Restaurant reputation management is the process for restaurants to manage customer feedback and creating systems to improve customer experiences, passively build positive online reviews, and save at-risk customers. It is a very important aspect of running a successful restaurant business.

Learn More About Restaurant Reputation Management Here

How Does Bloom Identify and Bring Back Lost Customers?

Bloom Intelligence uses machine learning to identify at-risk customers. When one is recognized, the system will send them a message with an incentive to get them to return and re-establish their visit pattern. Bloom users are seeing up to 37% of churning customers return.

Learn More About Saving At-Risk Customers Here

SAVE TIME, INCREASE CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUES, CREATE NEW CUSTOMERS

What our happy customers
are saying

“SaaS that covered so many bases for us instead of having to use multiple software products. Bloom Intelligence has simplified our responses to reviews, customer feedback, and more. I highly recommend Bloom Intelligence.”

Robert Sanderson

“Bloom Intelligence really is a step ahead in terms of marketing software and metrics. Their product is reliable, fast and innovative and has helped the company I work for really grow.”

John Marchetti

“Working with Bloom Intelligence has been amazing. They assist you every step of the way and work with you hand in hand to make sure you are optimizing your advertising potential. We are excited to use this tool to help learn more about our customers so that we can personally engage with them and understand our strengths/weaknesses.”

Ariel Ramirez

“In these challenging times, it has been a pleasure working with Bloom Intelligence to help facilitate our service offering to our clients. They were extremely responsive and provided support to mitigate risk and minimize revenue loss. Great partner!”

Stefan Kim

“We’re extremely pleased with the wealth of customer data that we’re able to gather, at a very attractive price.  In addition, we’re able to communicate our new product promotions by using  the landing page as a digital billboard.  A “no-brainer” for anyone working with limited Marketing $$.”

Bob Cross, Vice President of Operations

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