​How loyal are your guests?

​Chances are you have some kind of loyalty program at your restaurant – and if you have graduated past the little plastic loyalty cards carried on keychains, you might think your program is doing okay. But have you studied exactly how well it’s helping you turn a new customer into a loyal one? Are you able to assess large amounts of data and translate that into targeted promotions that reach customers at just the times when they’re most likely to respond? According to a recent podcast on Pizza Marketplace with Tom Byrnes, vice president of marketing at LedgerPay, most loyalty programs aren’t succeeding. Research from Deloitte found that the average loyalty app loses 95 percent of its active user base within 90 days of it being downloaded, so most restaurant loyalty programs are engaging only a small portion of their customer base. Still, loyalty programs, when done right, are worthwhile: It’s nine to 11 times more expensive to recruit a new customer than to retain an existing one, so having a loyalty program that attracts and continuously engages new members is paramount. Your program should allow you to not only collect consumer data but to easily slice and dice it in a meaningful way. When you create a promotion for a subset of your loyalty program members, you should be able to readily find out how many people took you up on it, for instance – and how that offer’s response rate and profits compared to the promotion you sent them last month. How well does your program deliver for you?

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