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:
Know Your Customers
Much like your other guests, it’s important to know as much possible about your catering customers as well. Knowing the order cadence for each guest so that you can accurately target your lapsed catering customers with promotions and incentives is just as important as in any other piece of your marketing campaigns.
What Does Success Look Like?
Whether catering is new to your restaurant or not, measuring your performance is necessary to know if your efforts are working and what areas need to be targeted for improvement. Some metrics to look at are:
Follow these tips and you can add a catering rewards program to your restaurant that highlights the unique aspects of the catering business and provides a boost to your revenue.