5 simple loyalty campaigns to drive sales
The key purpose of a
loyalty scheme is to drive more visits to your venue and increase sales. Whilst a loyalty points scheme can achieve this on its own to some extent, the real potential lies in the data you hold on your loyalty members purchasing and spending habits.
Unfortunately, many businesses struggle to make use of this data. This is perhaps understandable when you consider that it is often spread across multiple systems - an EPOS, loyalty CRM (customer relationship management) system, and
booking system, for example. Integrating these systems together to be able to use this data effectively is often complicated, in terms of both set up and ongoing use.
Our
hospitality EPOS & management suite solves this problem by incorporating all of these functions into one easy to use system.
If you already use our EPOS or have an alternative integrated set up, the next step is deciding how to use your data to run effective, targeted campaigns.
In this article we look at some of the best ways to use your loyalty data to market to your members and drive increased visits and spend.
Birthday campaign
One of the most popular campaigns in hospitality is to reach out to a customer in the weeks leading up to their birthday to offer them a free drink or other special promotion to celebrate it at the venue.
This campaign is simple to run with many systems as it only requires data on the customer, that is likely to be held all in one system. A simple filter on anyone with a birthday in the desired time range is all that is needed to produce a list of customers to reach out to. This can be used to send the members an email to invite them along to celebrate their special day.
However, an integrated system does offer some benefits. In our management suite, once the customer list is generated it can be used to allocate those members to a birthday promotion on the EPOS, automatically triggering the offer for the guest if they choose to take it up. A push notification can also be sent to members to notify them of their exclusive promotion.
Targeted preferences campaign
A targeted campaign to customers who like to buy certain products is what many businesses would like to achieve with their loyalty marketing. However, this does require a good integration between a venues EPOS and loyalty platform.
An example of a targeted preferences campaign would be to run a 241 cocktail promotion for loyalty members on an otherwise quiet night. Rather than spamming all of your members with this offer, potentially leading to people ignoring your emails or unsubscribing, you can produce a list of anyone who has purchased a cocktail in the previous 3 months. These members are likely to be happy to receive your offer, and are also more likely to take it up. Similarly to the birthday offer, with our system you can also send a push notification to your members informing them of a promotion you know they are likely to be interested in.
The drop off campaign
The drop off campaign looks for customers who generally visit your venue frequently, but for some reason have dropped off more recently. You can target these members with an offer to try to draw them back in.
This campaign requires a good integration between your EPOS and loyalty platform, and ideally even your booking system.
With data from these systems you can filter for members who have visited more than 10 times in the last 6 months but haven’t visited at all in the last month.
You can set up an offer, similarly to the above campaigns, to try to entice these members back in.
The big spender campaign
The big spender campaign looks to reward those who tend to spend a lot of money with you, and also encourage them back in. A simple offer like a free drink could be enough to draw these customers back, and based on their previous spending habits their visit is likely to more than make up for the cost of the offer.
There are two ways to run a big spender campaign. One is to look for total spend over a time period that is above a certain level. The other is to look at the average spend per visit over the time period. The latter is likely to lead to better results in terms drawing in those customers who are likely to spend enough to easily justify the free drink or other promotion you offer.
The big event
Whilst not really a targeted campaign, this is still worth a mention. For a big event, such as a New Years Party, you will want to reach out to as many customers as you can. This makes this type of campaign fairly straightforward as you don’t need data on purchases or spending habits.
However, there is still a big benefit here to having an integrated set up, as your customer data is likely to be split across different systems - for example, your loyalty system and your booking system. By having your loyalty system and booking system data all in one place you can create one campaign that can target all of the customers you have details for (as long as you have the required marketing consents).
If you already run loyalty scheme, hopefully the above can give you some ideas on how to make use of your data. These campaigns have the double benefit of driving sales whilst also making it more likely that your customers will be happy with the communications they receive. Marketing to your customers too frequently, or with offers that aren’t relevant to them can end up being counter productive.
If you want to start an effective loyalty scheme, but you don’t yet have the systems set up to achieve it, we’d love to hear from you. We can show you in a short demo how simple it can be to run the above campaigns on top of the many other benefits of using a fully integrated hospitality management system.
If you are interested in finding out how our hospitality management suite with Loyalty & CRM features can help transform your business, get in touch with our team of hospitality experts.
