Loyalty cards offer a smarter, long-term approach to discounting and continue to be a powerful restaurant marketing tool

Discount dining continues to be all the rage in the restaurant industry. But it’s worth considering whether endless discounting, on its own, is the best strategy.

After all, discount diners aren’t known for being a loyal crowd. Once your deal has ended they’ll be off to hand in their 20% off vouchers elsewhere, and unless you’ve given them an incentive to return they could be gone forever.

We’d love to believe that excellent food and service should be enough on its own. But sometimes customers need that extra nudge in the right direction when booking a table.

An oft repeated marketing idiom is that ‘it costs more to attract new customers than it does to retain existing ones’. And this rule is certainly true if discounting is your only restaurant marketing strategy. So it’s worth considering how you can use loyalty cards as a way of extending the relationship far beyond the first visit.

Benefits of loyalty cards as a restaurant marketing tool

Offering a loyalty card on your website is a great way of capturing a customer’s email address. You can then feed this into your database to entice them back with a steady flow of offers, recipes and insights into your restaurant.

Unlike money off vouchers anybody can use, loyalty cards enable you to structure your discounts in a way that rewards customers for repeat visits. This could be as simple as a card which you stamp after every meal. You could then offer customers a half price meal after earning five stamps. This is obviously much better for the balance sheet than 20% discounting every other month.

Or you could get more sophisticated with an electronic card system that credits customers with points after every meal. Along with offering free meals in exchange for points, you could form alliances with other local businesses and offer free hair cuts or spa treatments in exchange for earning points at each other’s venue.

For exceptionally loyal customers, which really rack up the points, you could really push the boat out and offer to send your chef round to their home to cook a special meal. An offer like this would be absolute restaurant marketing gold, so make sure you take plenty of photos and publicise it in the local press and online (blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube…) to show how your restaurant looks after its loyal customers.

To help restaurateurs keep up with the learning curve we organise Livebookings Academy events and webinars where we talk about trends in technology and marketing.

See the upcoming dates and register for events here!

By Livebookings in Blog, Restaurant Marketing