Archive for the “Restaurant Industry” 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.

There’s some tasty news to celebrate this summer. Delish Sisters, a fresh and wholesome food brand from South Africa, opened its first-ever U.S. location at Clemson University’s new The Shepherd Hotel, a full-service accommodation that employs individuals with disabilities.

Delish Sisters sought out Paytronix technology for online ordering and delivery, customer loyalty, gift cards, and the launch campaign. As part of the Paytronix Gives Back program, the cost of the programs were covered in full.

According to the Delish Sisters’ website, the eatery’s collaboration with The Shepherd Hotel and the ClemsonLIFE program brings, “a team concept with heart, centered around empowering and employing people with special needs/abilities.” The Shepherd Hotel was founded with the mission of positively impacting lives, while ClemsonLIFE empowers students with intellectual disabilities. Paytronix could not be more proud to have a customer that supports this mission.

Though the original plan was to launch in March, construction delays had no damper on the Delish Sisters’ opening day. On August 8, gorgeous green plants, a bouquet of fresh flowers, and freshly baked croissants were arranged neatly in the light-filled restaurant. Employees smiled as Delish Sisters welcomed its first customers—just in time for fall semester.

To learn more about how Paytronix helps its customers create frictionless customer experiences, visit https://www.paytronix.com/platform/.

Customer behavior is always changing – and to keep up, all restaurants need to be able to provide a top-of-the-line guest experience.  Whether your guests come into your locations or order online, they should have the ability to engage with loyalty programs, purchase and redeem gift cards, and place their orders with ease.  While national chains have a lot of resources at their disposal, using the right technology can level the playing field and help independent restaurants and small restaurant groups compete. 

As a provider of enterprise-class customer experience products to restaurants large and small, here are the 3 “must-haves” Paytronix recommends to keep your independent brand competitive: 

1. Online Ordering: Since 2020, the number of restaurant customers looking to place food orders digitally has skyrocketed.  While some customers are looking forward to getting back to restaurants and gathering and dining with friends and family in person, many have permanently embraced the convenience of ordering and dining at home. 
    
   With Paytronix Order & Delivery, restaurants can streamline their online ordering operations, to make it easier for your staff to focus on what matters most.  As online ordering rose in popularity, many restaurants raced to partner with brands like Door Dash and Uber Eats to capture more orders, but were left with three or four tablets with orders coming in, and needing to manually enter those orders into the POS. Handoff^SM brings all of the orders from third parties like Door Dash and Uber Eats and integrates right to your POS, reducing human error and freeing up staff to wait on in-house guests. 
   
   Once your customer receives their order – how does your management team know they’ve enjoyed their meal? On-site guests can talk to their server, and managers can make a situation right on the spot, but off-premise customers often don’t have any way to express themselves except to leave a bad review or decide not to return again.  With FEEDback^SM your restaurant managers can save a guest relationship right away by getting instant responses from customers, and enabling the manager to respond to negative experiences with discounts and offers at the touch of a button. 

2. Loyalty: Loyalty programs do more than foster goodwill between you and your guests. They provide a valuable communication channel and help to grow your customer’s lifetime value. Built with the busy operator in mind, Paytronix delivers personalized, targeted, email messages in real-time so you can drive traffic every day. 
   
   The Paytronix platform also adds a layer of artificial intelligence to your campaigns by predicting future behavior, enabling highly productive segmentation, and making on-the-spot recommendations to increase spend and order frequency.  
   
   Regular customers are what drive business – but what happens when one of your regulars hasn’t been in for a while. How can you reach out to them and tempt them with a special offer or promotion to bring them back to your locations? A win-back campaign does just that, by identifying your customers who have missed an expected visit and sending them an offer to come back and remember what they love about your restaurant before they’re gone for good.  
   
   Check out this story of a brand who used a Win-Back Campaign to reengage with wayward loyalty members…with a 10.9x return! 

3. Gift Cards: Restaurant gift cards are a popular way for your customers to share their love of your brand, whether for the holidays, a special event, or as a thank you and modern gift card programs include the ability to purchase and send a virtual gift card online as well as on site.  
   
   And for those customers who receive a gift card, making it as easy as possible for them to redeem their card creates a positive experience that they’re sure to remember.  Providing the option for both online and on-site redemption with an online ordering integration means that these customers can celebrate the way they choose. 
   
   By using loyalty, online order & delivery, and AI-driven insights with one platform, you have all the data you need to motivate your guests to buy more often and more frequently and a program with the flexibility to grow as you do. 

Interested in learning more? Get a demo with the team to learn more about what Paytronix can do for your brand.