The Restaurant and C-Store Guide to Customer Engagement

In the food service industry, leaders are always looking for ways to gain an edge. In the United States, there are currently over 152,000 convenience stores and more than 700,000 restaurants. While resources like the Economic Resilience Toolkit can help your business thrive, there are other factors to consider.

Many consider customer engagement to be an essential tool that connects your brand with your guests across platforms and in-store. Meaningful connections with your customer base help guests feel valued, while also increasing long-term loyalty and repeat visits for your business.

In this guide, we’ll define customer engagement, discuss its importance to convenience stores and restaurants, and explore strategies to help your business engage customers at any stage.

What Is Customer Engagement and Why Does It Matter?

Customer engagement is the difference between a customer who visits once a month and one who visits weekly (or daily, if you’re lucky). It’s not about one-time discounts and interactions that draw in customers once. It’s a strategy that builds upon itself to create long-lasting emotional connections between your customer and your brand.

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is the act of building connections and relationships with your customers. It differs from a transactional perspective where a guest enters your premises, shops, or dines with you once, and doesn’t return. Instead, it’s a long-term approach to marketing that drives loyalty, creates consistent positive experiences, and encourages repeat visits.

Typically, this means brands provide a personalized service with attentive staff that make guests feel valued.

What Does Customer Engagement Mean for Restaurants and C-Stores?

For restaurant owners and convenience store operators, customer engagement has a direct link to business success. Customers who are engaged with your brand tend to make more frequent visits, spend more per visit, and are more likely to recommend your brand to their network.

Together, these lead to increased guest frequency, higher lifetime value, and stronger brand preference.

The Definition of Client Engagement vs. Consumer Engagement

Consumer engagement typically refers to the way businesses build relationships with their customers, while client engagement refers to an organization working with other businesses to provide long-term services.

Essentially, customer engagement is different in B2B and B2C environments.

Define Client Engagement for Multi-Location Brands

Client engagement refers to the relationship between a business (which may be an individual or an organization) and its interactions with and collaborations with other companies or clients. (Typically refers to B2B, while customer engagement refers to B2C).

Businesses can navigate this by offering personalized services, such as monthly packages and long-term contracts with discounts for longer commitments. They may also offer exclusive tools to clients that work with them long-term.

What Is Consumer Engagement?

Consumer engagement refers to the way a business connects with its end customers. For most c-stores and restaurants, this typically means personalized offers, gamified rewards or incentives, loyalty programs, and personalized experiences designed to create a lasting emotional connection that drives repeat business.

Why Customer Engagement in Marketing Drives Revenue

Customer Engagement Marketing Explained

Customer engagement in marketing layers adds a layer of relationship-building to each campaign, enhancing its effectiveness. It ensures the customer continues to have positive associations and experiences with your brand and is an integral part of a restaurant's or convenience store's marketing plan.

If you leverage customer engagement marketing tools and tie in personalized offers using loyalty programs, you can increase the customer lifetime value. Other factors increase, such as retention and brand affinity, making customers more likely to be open to an upsell, as they view it as an opportunity to purchase from a brand they love.

The Role of Personalization in Customer Engagement

Customizing customer engagement marketing efforts across various channels, such as email, SMS, or in-app promotions and notifications, is an effective way to reach your customers and build deeper loyalty while offering them something they want.

Understanding Engagement of Customers Across the Lifecycle

Every customer is at a different stage in their journey. We’ll explore each one below and examine the stages.

Mapping the Customer Journey

Engaging customers typically follows a similar customer journey.

The standard customer journey:

• Awareness: At this stage, customers are learning about your brand and becoming aware of your products and offerings. Potential customers may discover your brand through social media, Google, referrals, or other marketing channels.
• Consideration: During this stage, customers begin to consider your brand, particularly in situations where your business or product can help them solve a problem. They also compare your brand against your competitors.
• Purchase: They’re ready to buy your products at this stage or visit your restaurant for a meal.
• Retention/Loyalty: Once customers have visited or purchased a product from you, you want them to continue coming back and maintain high retention/loyalty. Businesses employ various marketing strategies, including the use of loyalty programs that often feature built-in coupons, sales, and standard email outreach.
• Advocacy: Advocacy occurs when customers appreciate and enjoy your business/products so much that they share them with others. They become a referral for your business, spreading the word and encouraging others to visit or make a purchase.
  

Customer Engagement Level Stages

There are different levels of customer engagement. Knowing which category a customer falls into can help you build better relationships with them while maintaining and increasing retention.

An “engaged customer” generally refers to how a customer engages with or interacts with your business/brand. These types of engagements can be monitored through reviews, purchase history/frequency, app usage, and overall loyalty/visits.

Three customer engagement levels:

Low engagement: Customers aren’t very familiar with your business and have very little interaction. Perhaps they’ve heard of your business or read a review but haven’t taken the next step to engage with it, such as visiting your restaurant or convenience store.

Medium engagement: At this level, customers are familiar with your restaurant or convenience store and may have visited once, signed up for your loyalty program, or made a purchase. Even though they’ve visited, they don’t have a deep loyalty to your business and may visit occasionally. At this stage, customers should receive personalized offers through a loyalty program to foster the connection.

High engagement: Customers with high engagement are sharing your business with their friends and family as your advocate. They regularly visit or make purchases at your restaurant and have a higher customer lifetime value.

How to Engage Customers at Every Stage

Connect with your customers at every stage using customer engagement marketing strategies.

How to Engage with Customers Effectively

If you’re unsure how to engage customers, there are specific strategies you can follow at each stage.

Those at the low engagement stage would benefit from welcome messages, introductory offers, and other personalized messaging that encourage them to visit your restaurant or convenience store. It has to be appealing enough for them to choose your unknown brand over other brands they are familiar with and love.

Customers with medium engagement are familiar with your brand but require reasons to continue visiting your establishment. Win-back campaigns, surprise rewards, weekly or monthly challenges, or personalized discounts may be what they need to build a deeper connection with your brand.

Those at a high engagement level will benefit from “higher level” rewards such as invites to exclusive events, gifts on birthdays, and social validation.

How to Engage with Your Own Clients Strategically

Engaging with clients is more than following marketing strategies; it’s an art form that involves analyzing data and providing your guests with account-based engagement that resonates with their level of understanding.

Set up data-driven check-ins on your mobile app or other platforms to track engagement while building connection, offer exclusive perks, and check in with post-visit follow-ups to see how they’re enjoying your restaurant or convenience store.

The Best Ways to Engage Customers in Restaurants and C-Stores

Keeping customer engaged with your business goes further than sending them a coupon on their birthday each year. Here are proven ways to engage with customers:

7 Proven Ways to Engage With Customers

The beauty of engaging with your customers is that you can do it on your own terms and in your own way. Here are some ideas to get started:

1. Refer-a-friend programs can offer access to your already engaged customer network. With these programs, you typically provide a discount or promo code to the referrer and referee.
2. Loyalty program integrations, such as Paytronix’s software, are connected to mobile payments and customer information, which can offer personalized coupons and incentives to encourage customers to visit your restaurant.
3. Gamified challenges are typically available through a mobile app and may include a “spend-to-unlock” reward, a digital scratch-off, a spin-the-wheel game, or other traditional games.
4. Interactive kiosks allow customers to quickly place their orders, explore new products, and engage with your menu. They allow for exploration in a more tactical way than just looking at the menu.
5. Social media campaigns offer brands a chance to connect with their customers. Businesses can use it to have contests, polls, or even promote user-generated content.
6. Personalized offers can be extended using a customer's previous purchase history.
7. Exclusive limited-time offers are generally sent using SMS or push notifications on mobile apps. They’re available for a short period of time and drive repeat visits.

Engaging Customer Service Tactics That Boost Retention

Customer engagement also extends into customer service engagement tactics that can improve their experience during each visit, which naturally leads to increased retention.

Strategies such as staff training programs can provide your employees with in-depth knowledge about your menu or products and equip them with the skills to deliver a higher level of customer service.

Post-purchase surveys are a simple way to follow up on a client's experience. They can share feedback on ways to improve their visit or what they really love. Mobile order follow-ups are similar, and customers can provide feedback about the service they experienced.

Support Engagement vs. Service Recovery Tactics

Customers should receive support at every step of their journey.

The Difference Between Support Engagement and Proactive Experience

Support engagement generally encompasses support from a business via direct channels. This may include an in-app help center, live chat, email support, or integrated AI support systems.

Proactive experiences provide customer support and engagement before clients even realize they need it. This may include onboarding guides or tips via seamless check-ins.

Using Social Media to Engage With Customers

Social media eliminates barriers and allows for easy marketing tactics to engage with customers.

Engaging With Customers on Social Platforms

Social media platforms enable marketing teams to create engaging or educational content for their target audience, allowing clients to interact with them directly on the platform.

What does this look like in practice? First, you’ll want to utilize each platform's unique strengths. For example, create groups on Facebook, make polls on Instagram, go after replies on X, and create user generated content on TikTok to reach a wider audience.

Social Listening as an Engagement Tool

Social listening tools can do the heavy lifting for you. They scour the internet to gather feedback on your brand or business, help anticipate your team's needs, and identify trends using social listening tools.

This tool can help you increase customer engagement by listening even more to what customers are saying about your business.

Measuring Customer Engagement Metrics That Matter

Metrics are any tool you can use to measure the success of your business, and in this case, how you can increase customer engagement.

Key Customer Engagement Metrics to Track

Customer engagement metrics can help you stay attuned to the needs of your business and how customers are interacting with it.

Customer engagement metrics may include:

• CES (Customer Effort Score) helps you measure how simple it is for customers to receive support or how much effort it takes to resolve an issue.
• The NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures a customer's loyalty and their likelihood of recommending your brand.
• CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) measures the level of satisfaction customers experience after certain types of interactions.
• Referral Rate typically tracks how often customers recommend your business or products to their friends, family, or network.
• Repeat Rate tracks how often customers visit to purchase from your business.
• Campaign Engagement Rate tracks how customers react to your marketing strategies, which can include click-through rates, email open rates, and app push interactions.

Using Customer Feedback to Improve Engagement

Insights gained through metrics enable marketing teams to enhance their offerings.

How to improve engagement through feedback:

1. Capture feedback: Metrics such as reviews, surveys, in-app ratings, and following social media will allow your team to gather structured data (like scores or ratings) and unstructured (reviews and comments) feedback.
2. Analyze the data: Following logical data systems, separate the data by service interaction, customer type, or location to find patterns or recurring themes.
3. Create new systems/strategies: After identifying the issues, the goal is to then address them by building smoother processes or updating the things falling through the cracks. Also, let customers know their voices are being heard.

Building Loyalty Through a Positive Customer Experience

Customers should walk away from your restaurant feeling like they had a positive experience. The same principle applies to online interactions.

Why Customer Satisfaction Is Central to Loyalty

To keep customers longer and increase retention, they must feel a deep level of customer satisfaction with your brand or business. Long-term customer loyalty is tied to a consistently positive experience every time they visit, whether in person or virtually.

Real-World Experience Design Strategies

There are numerous ways to enhance strategies for a more effective real-world experience for customers. Each improvement should create a seamless interaction between your staff and the customer.

Enhance your property with drive-thru upgrades, offer kiosks for menu exploration and efficiency, create personalized emails for in-store visits, or improve the user experience of mobile apps.

Streamlining the Engagement Process With Automation

Automation is the name of the game in the modern restaurant industry. Instead of wasting time, your marketing team can set up systems to drive revenue.

Optimize Engagement With AI and CRM Tools

Paytronix’s loyalty program offers both AI and CRM tools to manage customers with minimal effort. Software programs like this offer built-in messaging, rewards, and segmentation, saving you time and money on developing a native app yourself while fostering customer loyalty.

Reduce Friction With Smart Automation

Smart automation reduces friction for customers while also increasing revenues for clients. This can look like dynamic rewards based on visit frequency, cart reminders when items are left in a cart but not purchased, and location-based triggers.

Customer Retention and Engagement Are Intertwined

Ultimately, customer retention is closely tied to customer engagement, as you can’t create high retention without a high level of engagement.

How Engagement Fuels Customer Retention

As customer engagement deepens, a customer's repeat behaviors also increase, which can be measured through app sessions, rewards activation, and visit cadence, among other metrics. Think of it as a habit setting in; humans love habits and creature comforts.

Retention Campaign Ideas for At-Risk Guests

Retention campaigns are solutions that target at-risk guests (guests who aren’t visiting as regularly) and supply them with engagement materials with “win them back”. These types of materials may include win-back emails, dormant loyalty offers, or birthday offers.

Future Trends in Customer Engagement and Technology

As we head into the future, the tools in our marketing toolkit expand even further, particularly with AI tools in this next phase.

The Next Wave of Customer Engagement Technology

While some of these advancements are already available, many restaurants and convenience stores have yet to take advantage of them.

AI chatbots can interact with customers and provide instant answers, as well as provide access to a deeper understanding of your business. AR menus offer an interactive way to explore your offerings or products, and predictive analytics can help you target customers with a higher lifetime value.

Frequently Asked Questions About Guest and Customer Engagement

What is the definition of customer engagement?

Customer engagement is the act of interacting with customers to build connections and, ideally, increase customer loyalty.

What are the 6 key elements of customer engagement?

The six key elements of customer engagement are: personalization, communication, value-based content, trust, feedback to drive improvements, and reliability.

What are the goals of customer engagement?

The goals of customer engagement are to increase loyalty, which drives customer lifetime value, improves customer satisfaction, and increases repeat purchases.

Final Thoughts on Customer Engagement Strategy

Engagement isn’t a marketing expense; it’s a revenue drive that should be part of the ethos of a business. When leadership prioritizes customer engagement, employees deliver better service to every guest, making it a natural way to build loyalty.

Explore Paytronix’s loyalty program tools and experience the demo to start creating better customer engagement strategies today.