Archive for the “Guest Engagement” Category

Gift cards are a key part of the guest engagement ecosystem often acting as a way that guests can share their favorite brands with others. Also, in today’s mobile-oriented world, e-gift with recharge acts as a way for guests to store value that they can use for regular orders. So choosing the right provider is key.

Gift Card Tips

Gift cards help you extend your brand presence beyond your locations by expanding your channels and meeting your guests where they are. You can also offer online or virtual gift cards. Beyond that, you can expand to third-party and discounted third-party retailers, but remember that this step adds complexity. It’s important to know the limits of your spreadsheets by tracking sales fees, discounts, breakage across programs, and money movement between locations.

Investing in a Gift Card Solution

When selecting a gift card software provider, you need to make sure that the platform delivers the automation you need, so that you can avoid having to manually track gift card costs and discounts. Discount tracking is a huge part of this automation; it helps you recognize the expense card-by-card and transaction-by-transaction.

You also need a provider that can help you track money movement (both centralized and decentralized) across different stores, franchises, and corporations.

Tips for Managing a Successful Program

• One of the most time-consuming processes in this realm is reconciling gift card sales and redemptions across different systems. Robust and trustworthy reporting on liability and redemption can help you be prepared for audits.
• Avoid guest friction by making it easy to purchase, redeem, and check the balances of gift cards, and ensuring funds are redeemable both at the point of sale and for online ordering.
• Keep your franchisees happy by ensuring that accurate, reliable, timely, and automated settlement funds are available.
• Keep your guests happy by considering comp cards instead of gift cards; gift cards can add extra layers of complexity for your accounting.

[Image: Comp cards vs. gift cards slide]

10 Tips for Making the Change

1. Make sure that you own your data and can easily access it.
2. Create a team that handles gift card migration; this involves marketing, IT, finance, and operations.
3. Streamline the migration process to ensure all appropriate parties are weighing in.
4. Understand the timeline of the process so that your customers do as well.
5. Perform POS configuration and testing to ensure success.
6. Make an inventory of your current gift card stock to ensure you can meet demand.
7. Integrate online ordering so that the customer experience is as smooth as possible.
8. Consider third-party channels, while understanding that they add complexity.
9. Consider e-gift cards for added convenience.
10. Be sure your new provider matches or improves your current reporting.

How Gift Card Programs Can Serve Your Strategy

Gift cards can be a key part of a larger guest engagement strategy. When combined with loyalty programs, ordering, and comp, they can create real and lasting value, as long as they are smoothly aligned with each other.

Listen to the Paytronix podcast with restaurant and retail analyst Ryan DiLello here.

The great thing about selling gift cards is that it’s about more than making a gift of a nice meal – it’s about giving someone a great experience. Full-service restaurants know this, and they’ve realized that gift cards are an ideal way to turn first-timers into regulars… and regulars into brand ambassadors. Because gift cards, after all, always bring customers back to the brands they love.

So how do restaurants go about winning gift card sales? Do they take a one-size-fits-all approach? Or is their strategy to get a little more targeted and a little more nuanced? Let’s take a look.

A Remarkable Recovery

The pandemic was catastrophic for the restaurant industry… but the numbers show it’s making a strong recovery. According to the Restaurant Gift Card Report: 2023 from Paytronix, gift card sales at full-service restaurants have staged a remarkable comeback from the worst depths of the pandemic. Year over year since 2021, both revenue from gift card sales and total cards sold at full-service restaurants increased, by 12% and 10%, respectively. This is especially interesting when compared with the numbers for quick-service restaurants, whose gift card sales actually declined (despite weathering the pandemic better overall).

Moreover, revenue from gift card sales at full-service restaurants has increased since 2019, although the number of cards sold at full-service restaurants has yet to hit pre-pandemic levels, with one exception: fine dining.

The Impact of Inflation

The majority of card sales at full-service restaurants are for $20, $25, $50, and $100 cards. As compared to 2019, the percentage of $50 and $100 cards sold has risen, while the percentage of $20 and $25 cards sold has fallen, indicating that inflation has pushed up the cost of a dining experience at these restaurants. On the whole, guests have responded in positive correlation with higher prices.

How They’re Winning Sales

Full-service restaurants have broken out every trick in the book to drive gift card sales. One evergreen, can’t-miss tactic that has consistently driven bigger results is the flash sale. Flash sales have worked particularly well for Duffy’s Sports Grill, a Paytronix client headquartered in Palm Beach County, Florida; their holiday gift card sales (during which physical gift cards are offered along with bonus dollars) have delivered incredible results. The results were especially dramatic in 2021: on flash sale days, sales increased by up to 10.9 times the daily average.

Don’t Forget Digital

Digital sales are also a critical tool in the toolbox. Digital gift card sales have seen a 12% increase in revenue year over year, and are often more valuable than physical cards, due to added perks and incentives from digital sales. During the holiday season, Cyber Monday continues to see the highest sales of any day during the holiday period from Black Friday to Christmas Eve. Even though digital cards represent just 12% of the gift cards sold between Black Friday and Christmas Eve, their sales have increased over 70% since 2019.

Would you like to know more? Just download the Restaurant Gift Card Report: 2023 from Paytronix FREE today.

Happy New Year!

The changing of the years always gives us a chance to look ahead. As the Paytronix team enters 2023, we asked our experts what to look for. Here are some of the responses from those with their fingers on the pulse of loyalty, online ordering, and the overall world of guest engagement.

Jeff Hoover, Director of Convenience Store Strategy

I think convenience stores will focus even more on loyalty in 2023 as more guests will be looking for value in a commodity (gas) during periods of high inflation. I also think convenience stores will begin to see even more value in the ability of loyalty to segment audiences and engage with customers in a personalized manner, with the ultimate purpose of driving both traffic and sales.

Also, reduced demand for gas due to higher prices and the growth in electric vehicles will force more retailers to focus on food service and other in-store convenience items. As these offerings come on the market, loyalty will provide a great tool to connect with customers, drive awareness, and encourage them to try new items. Overall, it’ll boost the longer-term sales of non-gas items.

Kristin Lynch, Director of Restaurant Strategy

Restaurant brands will continue to focus on loyalty in 2023 and will make guest engagement a priority.  They will look to answer the question “how best can I communicate, recognize, reward, and overall engage with my most loyal guests to drive their behavior?”  They might do this via program design (i.e. Bankable Points), guest recognition layers (i.e. Tiers, Badges) or Segmentation driven by AI (i.e. Individualized campaigns).

Marc Schultz, Head of Data Privacy and Security

Consumer sensitivity to Privacy and Security will continue to grow in 2023, as will the number of laws and regulations affecting how companies manage financial and personal data. This is a time to review what data is collected, how it is used, how it is protected, and how long it is retained. California’s CCPA/CPRA has redefined “Personal Information” and “Sharing” which is making companies re-evaluate the need to update their Privacy Policies and the opt-out links being presented to consumers.

EJ Van De Vegte, Director of Software Development

Loyalty accounts and programs are becoming more and more important for restaurants and convenience stores, but also for guest users. Where people were less concerned with the security of their loyalty accounts before, it is getting more important to the brands and their guests. The consumer threat is losing their data but also losing loyalty points or even gift card balances. Loyalty points represent value because an individual can use them to get free products or discounts. And eGift cards are straight-up money. All and all, aspects of a loyalty system become more akin to a banking system and need to be well protected. That protection has an impact on the user experience, so it becomes a balance between UX and security.

It’s gift card season.

Restaurants sell the bulk of their gift cards during the holiday season and the big change this year is that Cyber Monday has become the new Black Friday. When the Paytronix data specialists looked at the numbers, sales of eGift cards outpaced physical cards when it came to year-over-year growth.

Of course, the big news of 2022 remains inflation, and that’s what brought Rachel Wolfe at the Wall Street Journal to look at gift cards.

“Long viewed as impersonal by some, gift cards have taken on a new shine this season as a way to help givers maneuver around rising prices and let receivers buy what they actually need,” Wolfe wrote.

She also looked to Paytronix for commentary on gift cards and inflation. Said Chief Data Officer Lee Barnes: “… if I’m going to spend $50 on my brother-in-law, I may as well give him a gift card rather than get him that T-shirt I had been planning, which now may cost more.”

Read the full article over on WSJ.com (subscription required)