Often restaurants and coffee shops will notice a sudden decline in customers, including those they considered ‘loyal.’ This unexpected decline in footfall can be attributed to several factors. However, it also sheds light on the importance of enhancing the customer experience and attempting to win back customers.
Customers may stop visiting your restaurant or coffee shop because they’re bored, busy, or may have found a competitor with better offerings or prices.
Customers who stop coming are called ‘lost’ or ‘absent’ customers. You need to create a ‘customer win back strategy’ to reignite their interest in your brand and turn them from lost customers to regulars again.
Re-engaging former customers is a more effective strategy than building new relationships with new customers.
Research shows it costs 5 to 25 times more to acquire a customer than it is to retain one. In addition, a 5% improvement in customer retention can boost profits by 25% to 95%.
Former customers are aware of your brand and have enjoyed dining or sipping coffee at your brand in the past. This makes them more likely to accept re-engagement offers and campaigns. This is compared to new customers who require extensive and expensive marketing efforts to build trust from scratch.
Using F&B solutions, like restaurant loyalty programs and mobile push notifications, can help you re-engage and win back lost customers.
Tools like Foodics also help automate various restaurant tasks, making it easier to streamline customer re-engagement and other operations.
In this article, we’ll explore several strategies on how to win back lost customers and improve customer experiences in restaurants and cafés.
Customer Win Back Strategies: Identify Lost Customers
Before you can win back lost customers, you must first identify who those customers are. It’s not enough to feel that ‘some’ customers haven’t visited you recently. You need to use data to identify who is coming back and who isn’t.
This ensures your strategies are impactful and can bear fruit.
Use your customer relationship management (CRM) system and restaurant management system (RMS) to identify lost customers. Set a clear time frame to segment and see who hasn’t visited any of your venues or branches in the past 30, 60, or 90 days.
Selecting the right time frame depends on visit frequency at your location. Often for coffee shops, it could be days or weeks, for restaurants it can be 60 or 90 days.
Your restaurant point-of-sale (POS) system can also help you identify inactive customers as it records every visit and purchase. Your POS provides you with accurate data for the last time a customer came, while CRM gives you an overview of customer preferences and means of communication.
If you’re using an RMS like Foodics, you can review the data from your dashboard and generate POS reports that show your absence customers. Based on their behavior, you can then retarget those lost customers using messages and offers, instead of relying on guesswork.
Once you’re done, you can segment customers into groups based on visit frequency, average spending, favorite dishes or beverages, or merge all these attributes together.
It’s important to ensure that customers feel that these messages are directed to them. They need to feel like they’re being reinvited back.
Understand Why Customers Have Left
After determining who are your absent customers, it’s time to understand why they stopped coming back. Knowing the reasons for not coming back can be crucial in creating an effective win back campaign.
Common reasons why customers stop coming back:
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- A bad experience: Some of your customers have stopped visiting because their last experience was a bad one. This could be due to bad customer service, an issue with their order that wasn’t resolved quickly or in a satisfactory manner. One bad experience is enough to send customers packing. Here improving customer experiences and using win back campaigns can be quite effective.
- Customer relocation: If a customer has moved to another neighborhood or location, it may have become difficult for them to visit your restaurant or café.
- No incentive to come back: Sometimes customers may not find enough reasons to keep coming back. Especially if you have competitors offering the same dishes or beverages, giving out better offers, or offering more diverse options. Not having a loyalty and rewards program means customers don’t get points or rewards for visiting.
- Change in customer preferences: Over time, customer preference may change. For example, they may make lifestyle changes like turning to healthy vegetarian and vegan foods, or having a smaller budget or disposable income to eat out.
You can get a clear idea of why customers have stopped coming back through short customer surveys. You can send these surveys via SMS or email.
You can also check out customer reviews via restaurant review sites like Google, Instagram, and Tripadvisor.
The aim is to get a clear picture of why some customers have stopped coming back. Each reason will help you create the right re-engagement campaign to win them back.
Craft the Right Comeback Offer
To win back lost customers, you need to communicate with them via their preferred platform. This could be through text messaging (SMS), WhatsApp, or via mobile push notifications for limited-time offers. You can also use email for a detailed offer with images and links.
For personalized engagement, include the customer’s name, their favorite dish, or a personal comment they made in the past.
Create exclusive offers such as ‘Get 20% off dishes or beverages” or “Buy one, get one free.” Alternatively, you can add an incentive like a free coffee or dessert in the customer’s next visit.
These simple details show you care about your customers and make customers feel valued. It makes their return nature and based on a real desire to re-engage with your brand.
To make the most of your win back campaigns, make sure you pick the right time to send your offers. For example, weekends or lunchtime offers are more likely to entice customers.
You can also combine these with your summer marketing strategies.
Combining the right time with the right channel increases customer engagement and the likelihood of turning absent customers to returning ones.
Customer Win Back Strategies: Personalize Every Message
To ensure a successful win back campaign for your restaurant or café, you can’t just send general offers. Your messages need to be personalized.
Customers need to feel like you’re talking to them and only them. This adds a personal or human touch to your messages, turning your marketing efforts into a genuine opportunity to reconnect.
Begin by using the customer’s name and other information related to their previous visit. Make the customer feel important. This message wasn’t sent to them by chance.
If they were lost due to an unsatisfactory visit or experience, reassure them that you have made changes and that their next experience will be a great one.
If a customer has left a negative review, make sure you respond to them and re-invite them to your restaurant or café. Share your recent updates or improvements including those to your food menu based on customers’ comments.
This shows lost customers you take their feedback into consideration and that you care about enhancing their experiences.
Use a warm and friendly tone like a person talking not a brand. Consider using phrases like “We’ve missed you!” and “We hope to see you soon.”
Track, Learn, and Improve Your Restaurant
To ensure your restaurant’s marketing promotions and offers are successful and to consistently enhance the guest experience and win back lost customers, you need to conduct a performance review and analyze your data.
Review engagement, your returning customer rate, among other restaurant analytics.
Uncover patterns and ask yourself: Which offers attracted more customers? What are the top channels or messages that got the most engagement?
Based on the data collected, you can improve your restaurant’s campaigns, enhance messaging and offers.
Don’t forget to reward returning customers. Use loyalty points, exclusive offers, or even a simple mention on social media or customers’ preferred communication channel. This appreciation can increase customer loyalty.
Next Steps
Losing customers can be frustrating for many restaurants and coffee shop owners or operators. Regaining them isn’t a simple task but it’s an important one. It’s not less important than attracting new customers.
Your restaurant’s customer win back strategy shouldn’t be solely about sending a message. It’s about figuring out why they left in the first place and presenting experiences and offers worthy of their return. It’s about making them feel special. To win back your lost customers, you need to show them you care, choose the right timing for your campaign, and the right tools.
Foodics also provides you with detailed analytics across the customer journey, ensuring you have the right tools to make the right decisions for your business.
Don’t let your loyal customers fall through the cracks. Start your first customer win back campaign with Foodics and regain and retain those customers. Book a personalized demo to learn more!
