It’s no secret that your loyal guests are the lifeblood of your business.
So when a guest changes their habit of visiting your establishment, do you have a way of knowing? Can you entice them to come back?
There is an enormous amount of competition in the restaurant and retail industries, and it doesn’t take much to shift a patron’s routine.
That change in routine can result in a guest who is at-risk of churning shifting into a fully-churned customer.
At the end of the day, if they aren’t dining or shopping at your establishment, they are doing it somewhere else. So, this should be an important part of your restaurant marketing plan.
Fortunately, there is a simple to use solution to help business owners know when a guest is at-risk of churning. Now you can easily reconnect with your guest before their loyalty shifts to your competition.
Perhaps the best way to understand and shape customer behavior is by utilizing a WiFi customer intelligence and analytics platform.
Preventing Customer Churn with WiFi Marketing Automation
Automation is a tool that can make your restaurant marketing efforts efficient and more productive.
It will automatically send pre-written marketing messages to guests when they meet specific criteria set by the marketer.
Using these “triggers” or scheduled automation, you can make marketing tasks easier. This includes re-engaging guests who are at risk of churning.
Automation helps with tasks that may slip through the cracks if we had to rely on our memory alone, or when we simply do not have the time to do it manually.
When it comes to utilizing automated marketing to engage at-risk customers, WiFi guest intelligence can provide powerful insight.
Imagine being able to identify a churning guest and send a message without having to lift a finger:
“We haven’t seen you in a while and we miss you. We hope everything is well with you and look forward to seeing you soon! We’d like to offer you a free appetizer with your next meal. Hope to see you soon! Your friends at….”
More importantly than what your message says – and content does matter – is letting your customers know they are valued on a personal level.
It is also a great way to stay top-of-mind. There is absolute truth in the proverb that states, “out of sight, out of mind.”
When you realize this means you must keep tabs on all of your customers to the best of your ability, the need for automation begins to take on more clarity.
Increase Your Guest Retention Rates
When it comes to retaining customers, automation can help us with doing things better than we could without automation – at least realistically speaking.
With WiFi marketing systems like Bloom Intelligence, we are given the ability to see whether our customer has been to our location recently, regardless of whether they log in or not.
So, when it comes to recognizing and retaining at-risk guests, those employing a WiFi marketing and analytics platform have a distinct and powerful advantage.
We only need to examine a real-case scenario to see how this applies.
In a recently-released case study, Jefferson’s was able to identify and bring back over $250,000 worth of lost guests.
Click on the image below to download and read the case study.
Recognizing the At-Risk Customer
Even if you manage a single-location small shop or family owned diner, you may believe you are “small enough” and have the volume to recognize and manage your at-risk patrons.
But if you consider the lost revenue from one loyal customer, not recognizing all of them can be significant.
What is the lifetime value of a customer? What will they purchase over the course of time and what does that mean to your establishment?
If you are the owner or marketing director of a multi-unit franchise, you have multiple locations and losing customers can result in substantial revenue loss.
You simply do not have the luxury of being unaware of customer behavior when your competition is becoming more aware and proactive at enticing your customers to be loyal to them.
Turn Your Guest WiFi Into A Churn-Prevention Machine
Regardless of the customer metrics you choose to track, from spending to engagement activity, recognizing pattern changes and trends is the concept that demands attention.
Therein lies the needle in the haystack.
If your business serves 1,000 weekly guests alone, that’s 4,000 guests a month for whom you must study behavior data, locate trends, omissions and other behavioral benchmarks.
So, having a dashboard to view exactly what is happening within a specific time period is vital.
You’ll be able to see frequency of visits, customer repeat rates, dwell times, individual potentially churning customers and overall churn rates.
And, most importantly, you’ll have the ability to shape customer behavior resulting in fewer churns and positive business trends.
Realistically there is no way to accurately and feasibly employ the human resources to manage such data quantities.
This is the beauty and the magic of WiFi marketing, analytics and automation.
Building an automated marketing campaign tailored to your customer behavior and your operational practices can be a huge safety net for your business when times are tough.
There will always be some guests who just can’t be saved – that’s just the nature of the business. But consider the many who can be saved.
This safety net will help you retain those who can be saved and that is worth every penny.
- Acquiring new customer can be as much as 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
- A mere increase of 5% in customer retention equates to more than a 25% increase in profit.
The financial and business sense of WiFi marketing, analytics and automation is evident.
Used effectively, you will foster relationships, promote trust and benefit both your business and your customers.
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