Building loyalty has always been an important concept in hospitality. Turning a one time purchase into a repeat customer has obvious benefits — income, brand sustainability, and growth.
The mass adoption of technology means the hospitality industry has plenty of new ways to build customer loyalty. We’re going to look into a few of those in this post.
1. Make sure your new customers are on your mailing list
A key advantage to online ordering is that you’ve got customer information — including customer email addresses. Your customers enter their email address to order with you anyway, you’ve just got to make the most of it.
Many of our clients automate this process by adding our Mailchimp integration to their online ordering. It seems obvious, but the key to making the most of loyalty is to make it incredibly easy.
2. Add a stamp card to your online ordering
Stamp cards offer both instant and medium term gratification, which helps you build a stronger emotional connection with your customer.
Ideally, your stamp card should offer similar advantages to the ones you would get by ordering in store. However, complicated loyalty programmes might benefit from being simplified first.
3. Reward customers for spreading the word
Customers are far more likely to act on recommendations from someone they know. You can encourage recommendations by rewarding people who share or post about you.
You could set up a voucher code that you give exclusively to your biggest advocates. Acknowledging your biggest sharers will keep them talking about you for years to come.
4. What’s in a name?
The personal touch can go a long way in building trust. You can incorporate personalisation by adding some name fields to your emails (just remember to set a nice default).
If you want to take things a step further, there’s so much you can find out by looking at your customer purchase trends. As Ben talked about in his post on customer engagement, we’re living in the age of data.
Keep the conversation going
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