To many people, a restaurant is a place where they go to eat (hopefully) delicious meals and drinks. For you, as a restaurant owner, it should be that and much more. You have to be at the top of your game to know what your most loyal customers want. This is the only way you can guarantee that they will return and not take their business to your competitors. A lot of restaurants try to do this using traditional methods like tally counter, video recording, or POS systems. While these methods can be used to collect some data, they aren’t comprehensive enough.
Want to know how you can gather comprehensive information? Guest Wi-Fi. Yes, your social Wi-Fi can be transformed into an efficient, intelligent, data-gathering system with the help of a captive portal. This tool will help you collect more customer data as they logon to your Wi-Fi network with their mobile devices than you can with POS and video.
In addition to garnering more data, Wi-Fi will give you the information you need to improve your target marketing. So in this post, we have put together 9 best practices for captive portals restaurants in restaurants.
- Measuring Foot Traffic
Every single day there is foot traffic in and around your restaurant. The question is, do you know how many they are? Do you keep a record of how many people come through your diner? You probably know some of your most regular customers but how much do you really know about them?
With Wi-Fi analytics, whenever any of your customers walk in you would know exactly who they are; how long they would likely stay; what meal they would order; and when they exit the premises. If for any reason they exhibit a change in their regular pattern, you may need to check to find out why.
- Observing Your Customer Churn Rate Carefully
Every business out there has churn rate, including restaurants. What happens is that some restaurants have a higher churn rate than others and it negatively impacts their revenue. You must avoid that as much as you can. To do this you need to study your churn rate data in order to recognize any patterns.
Could it be something on your menu? Or your dining area? Maybe there is something they want that you do not have? Or they did not like your services the first time they dined? You need to look into these possibilities and offer some value to bring them back.
- How Many Repeat-Business Do You Have Per Customer?
Without the proper tools, it is easy to miss some things. For example, you may not have taken notice of a customer who dines with you regularly. You should observe your data and do your best to reward these customers. Customers love to feel valued, if you want them coming back, show them some appreciation. You could do this by making them an exclusive offer or notify them of your best deals first.
- Include Regular Customer Into Loyalty Programs
Given that you have the proper data, you should develop a loyalty program for your regular customers. Time after time you can use more data you collect to create more targeted loyalty campaigns. The data you have will help you separate your customers into segments so that every loyalty program created is tailored to their preferences. Read about email marketing and customer segmentation: for restaurants and retail businesses here.
- Retargeting Dormant Customers
You will have some customers who will become dormant after dining at your restaurant. They may have been regular once but for some reason they don’t visit for a while. If you have collected information about them before their long absence, you can use it to design offers that will bring them back.
- Giving First-Time Customers Special Offers
Besides offering excellent meals and great customer service to your first-time, you need to send them special offers. The data you capture when they first visit may not be enough to design really specific offers. But you could send them offers you believe they will love based on what meal they ordered.
- Have Proper Staff Scheduling
The use of customer data to make good business decisions is an important best practice. One of such decisions is staff scheduling. With the customer information you have, you will know when you have your highest influx of customer. This will help you staff properly to handle the amount of customers in that period. After that time, you can reduce the amount of staff. In the end you save cost on staff payment and only hire when you need to.
- Test Your Marketing
When you create offers or content for your restaurant business you need to run a test on them. The test will let you see how effective your content would be. This will give you the chance to improve the content to suit your customers before you send the messages out. A common but effective way to test your marketing is the A/B test. In this test you separate your customers into two groups and send each group different formats of the same message. You can tell, from the results, which format performed better and then use it in subsequent marketing communications. Go here to read a comprehensive post on how to do A/B testing. With your captive portal you can collect data to help you better tailor your marketing communication.
- Collect Information From Franchises
If you currently own a restaurant franchise, Wi-Fi analytics tools can give you a thorough idea of what’s going on in every location. You can get this information on a daily basis if you want. This data is stored in the cloud making it easy to access from any mobile device. With it you can compare the foot traffic in every location and see how you can improve locations with low visitor traffic. This also applies to chain restaurants even though it may require more data in that case.
You can see how a Wi-Fi marketing and analytics tool can help you put these best practices in place by requesting a free demo. Or you can contact us if you have got questions.
POSTED ON July 31, 2019Share:
