There is more to building a successful restaurant than just preparing great food, having a good price, or specializing in a particular kind of cuisine. It’s also about marketing, because you need to bring new people through your doors and maintain the customers you already have. One tool in doing this is keeping customer profiles, including demographics, their behavior including the kind of food they buy, how they pay, and how often they visit, and other places they visit. Here are a few of the many benefits of creating and maintaining customer profiles.
Create the Best Loyalty Program
There is no doubt a loyalty program can be beneficial to your restaurant, and if you keep a customer profile of your customers it will be easier to create the best one. More than 75% of customers participate in a loyalty program, and those who do, spend 70% more money than those who don’t. Loyalty marketers earn about $12 for every dollar they spend on marketing. The profile you keep can help you uncover what your customers want the most. You can gather information about them by letting them log into your restaurant WiFi through social media or requiring an email address to do so.
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You can also provide an app for your restaurant. On the app, or your restaurant website, you can provide a survey that asks your customer’s preferences and what they like and dislike about your business. If a customer downloads your restaurant app, you can determine:
- How often they visit.
- When they are in the area.
- What special items they buy.
- The discounts they use.
- What meals they buy most often.
- How often they will likely visit in a lifetime.
- How often they participate in promotions or discounts.
By finding these things out, you can cater discounts to the customer, especially promotions for new items or items you know they might like, special events, membership cards, and punch cards, offering free or discounted items.
Improve marketing roi
How well do you know your customer demographics? It pays to know such things as:
- Your customer’s social media profiles
- Contact information
- Their purchasing behavior
- The age and gender of your customers
- Your customers’ area and zip codes
- Marital status
- Educational background
- Occupation
You can do a lot with this information. It is easy to use this valuable data in an analytics dashboard to compile and organize data reports. You can use this information to apply to future marketing campaigns. If you have your customer’s contact information, it will be easy to email him or her with discounts, specials, and other information your profile has already told you he will find useful.
Tips for developing customer profiles:
Create a Customer Map
Your simple customer map of individual customers can help you understand them better, such as their ages, educational background, whether they would rather come on the weekend, during the week, at night or for lunch, how much they want to pay, and whether they would rather have light meals, salads, sandwiches, or full dinners. Knowing these things can help you plan your email marketing campaign to reach them best. You should update the profiles at least every year, although every six months would be better.
Use surveys
One of the ways to create the best profiles is through surveys. You should have five to ten questions at most. Offer a percent off coupon, free dessert or appetizer, or some reward for participating. Only ask what you really want to know. Put the surveys on your app, website, or wi-fi landing page and give them at the completion of a meal. Ask questions related to demographics, their dining and discount preferences and anything you really want to know.
Segment Your Customers
What is segmenting? It is specifically targeting a specific group of customers to increase sales. This can separate you from your competitors and bring customers back for a return visit. This can include your most loyal customers, those in a specific neighborhood or area, those who like a specific type of cuisine or menu item best, those who have special preferences, such as gluten-free, and those who haven’t reviewed your restaurant yet.
As you can see there are huge benefits to maintaining customer profiles. Have you started creating yours yet?
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