Restaurant Customer Engagement Strategy

In today’s incredibly competitive restaurant environment, standing out from your competition is more important than ever.

Today’s consumers expect much more than great food and stellar customer service.

To earn their business, you need to fully engage them with your branding, your messaging and by their experience when they are at your place of business.

In other words, customer engagement strategy for restaurant operators and marketers should now be a top priority. It should be part of your restaurant’s culture at every level.

Remember, this goes well beyond providing a great meal.

So, engagement should be a part of your online digital marketing and offline marketing, as well.

Restaurant Customer Engagement Strategy Relies On Data

It is likely impossible for restaurant owners and operators to know every customer’s name, how they behave while on-location, what they order, and how much they spend.

But, if this is crucial for customer engagement, how can it be included as part of the engagement process?

Knowing and understanding your customers at scale may seem like a daunting task.

Fortunately, WiFi technology has made it much simpler to collect the comprehensive, reliable and clean data you’ll need.

Collecting Customer Data

Customers do not even need to log into your WiFi. As long as they are carrying a WiFi enabled device, such as their laptop or cell phone, your guest WiFi access point can sense that they are within range.

With a WiFi marketing and analytics platform, this data can be stored in a database and seen in an easy-to-use graphical interface.

You will immediately begin gathering real-time data about your customers.

For example, this data includes things like:

• Daily traffic counts
• First-time visitors
• First time visitor repeat rates
• Returning visitors and customer repeat rates
• Average customer dwell times
• Popular visit times and dwell times by hour

This data can give you great insights into how a vast majority of your customers are behaving while at your place of business.

Collecting Individual Customer Data

The data discussed above is available even if customers do not log into your WiFi.

However, when customers do log in, much more data can be collected on an individual customer level.

Customers only have to login one time. In other words, at the moment of the first login, a customer profile is created for the patron.

The system will include all past and future behavior data into their customer profile, even if they never log in again.

Over time, using a technique called progressive profiling, more rich data goes into their customer profile, such as age, birthday, gender, phone, postal code, and more.

So, you can build a customer list of thousands upon thousands of rich, comprehensive customer profiles.

This gives you amazing insight into who your customers truly are and how they behave. .

In addition, you can begin to group them into various groups based upon demographic or behavior data.

You will quickly discover your ideal customer personas, and then you can develop marketing and operations campaigns to appeal to those groups.

Restaurant Marketing Customer Engagement

With a WiFi marketing & analytics platform like Bloom Intelligence, it becomes possible to segment your individual customers into groups.

Then, you can create very targeted marketing messages that will have a much better chance of engaging the customer into taking your required action.

Segmented, targeted marketing is much more effective in terms of engagement and ROI.

Likewise, you can use the data for staff training on how to engage with your various customer personas.

Restaurant Customer Loyalty Programs Engage Customers

One of the most tried and tested ways of engaging restaurant customers is implementing a customer loyalty program.

Traditionally, restaurateurs would use punch cards or something as simple as a business card with a manager initialing it for each visit.

With WiFi, this is all done passively. The system will know every time the customer enters your place of business with their device.

The system will automatically send an email to the customer when they reach their loyalty goal. The email can contain a redeemable coupon code, allowing you to track redemptions and campaign ROI.

Engage Customers with a Ratings Feedback Loop

When a customer leaves your place of business, you automate an email to them. It will ask them for a rating of their recent experience.

If the customer responds with a positive rating, you can respond with a thank message containing links to your online ratings site pages.

Or, should the customer leave a poor rating, you can trigger an email containing an apology and an incentive to return and give you another chance, and then start the process over.

Over time, your online restaurant reputation should begin to improve. More positive ratings will appear and negative ratings will lessen through your feedback loop.

Discover Bloom Intelligence

This was just a small sample of how you can better engage your restaurant customers using Bloom’s WiFi marketing and analytics platform.

It’s time to get serious about engaging your restaurant customers.

Customer engagement a very important aspect of restaurant success today. So, make Bloom Intelligence your customer engagement and customer analytics platform.

Call us at 727-877-8181. Or, schedule a demo here and we’ll show you exactly how it’s done!

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