Guest engagement programs allow you to learn about and engage with the customers who participate. But what about the guests you don’t know – the ones who haven’t yet enrolled? Even with a loyalty program that has reached a 30-40% penetration rate, over half of your guests are still unknown to your restaurant. How can you communicate with those guests to offer them promotions, drive visits, and gain insight into their purchasing behavior?

One way is through coupons. By using coupons to complement your existing one-to-one loyalty program, you can improve your ability to market to all of your guests.

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Consider all of the conveniences that are available to modern consumers. They can wake up, make coffee with beans that were delivered in one day through Amazon Prime, shave with a razor from Dollar Shave Club, and get dressed in an outfit that was delivered in this month’s Stitch Fix box. As they ride to work in a prepaid Uber, they can browse articles on their phone courtesy of an online subscription to their favorite newspaper. After returning home, they can make dinner from a Blue Apron kit while listening to commercial-free music via a Spotify premium account, and then take a spin class as part of their ClassPass subscription.

As consumers, we’ve become used to subscription-based services in every aspect of our daily lives. The subscription business model has grown rapidly, increasing sales from $57 million in 2011 to $2.6 billion in 2016. Throughout the restaurant industry, several brands have successfully introduced subscription-based meals, with Olive Garden’s Never Ending Pasta Pass being a prime example. A limited number of guests could spend $100 for an eight-week pass or $300 for a full year, entitling them to unlimited servings of pasta, soup, salad, and breadsticks.

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Driven by the coming-of-age Gen Z, there are increasing numbers of diners who prefer dishes containing plant proteins at least some of the time. These flexitarians may no longer be satisfied with the old-standby vegetarian entrées like pasta or salads. To keep up with demand, restaurants from fast-casual to fine-dining are introducing more vegan-friendly options. Since customers can easily go online to scan menus and ratings, expanding your offer base to be inclusive of these various diets can help differentiate your restaurant from the ones above and below it in the search results.

But how can you know if your restaurant should change up the menu to introduce healthier and possibly vegetarian options? Test out these three easy ways to gauge whether your guests would appreciate more plant-based and healthy options (as opposed to having to modify existing items).

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Whether catering is already an established part of your restaurant or a new addition, offering your catering customers a rewards program designed just for them is a great way to grow a loyal repeat customer base.  Restaurant catering is a $33 billion industry, so it makes sense that casual, fast casual, and quick-service restaurants are making catering loyalty programs a priority.

Why Catering Loyalty?

For restaurants that don’t already offer catering, launching a catering program provides a steady flow of sales.  It also provides excellent opportunities to reach new audiences and grow awareness of your brand among those who might experience your brand for the first time at a catered event. The average business spends $1,100 per month on catering, with average orders over $200.  Thirty percent of catering customers order weekly, and twenty percent of them order multiple times per week.

That steady flow of reliable large orders could be a huge boost to your sales. By gaining even one or two new catering customers per week, you can reduce the strain of trying to acquire over twenty individual new guests.  Pairing a top-notch experience with a rewards program specifically for your catering customers is a great way to grow loyalty and inspire repeat purchases.

Driving Loyalty Through Catering Rewards

The nature of catering makes it necessary for you to develop a separate rewards program for your catering business.  If you have a rewards program for individual orders where for every ten orders you get one free, applying that to catering might result in a free order worth hundreds of dollars, revenue you don’t want to miss out on. Here are a few ways you can use a catering rewards program to drive loyalty: […]