Increase Restaurant Loyalty & Reach More Guests with Coupons

Guest engagement programs allow you to learn about and engage with the customers who participate. But what about the guests you don’t know – the ones who haven’t yet enrolled? Even with a loyalty program that has reached a 30-40% penetration rate, over half of your guests are still unknown to your restaurant. How can you communicate with those guests to offer them promotions, drive visits, and gain insight into their purchasing behavior?

One way is through coupons. By using coupons to complement your existing one-to-one loyalty program, you can improve your ability to market to all of your guests.

Here are three key benefits of introducing coupons into your restaurant’s marketing strategy:

• Engage with unknown guests through offers. People are more willing to try new restaurants when they can receive a discount, so posting coupon codes on your website or on social media gives you a way to acquire new customers. Once you get them through the door the first time, you can rely on your existing guest engagement strategy to motivate repeat visits.
• Drive enrollment into your restaurant loyalty program. Another way to use coupons is to promote enrollment and transition guests from unknown to known. For example, coffee sleeves or tabletop signage could carry a message encouraging guests to sign up and enter a code like “WELCOME” to receive a future discount.
• Measure engagement across channels. With coupons, you have the ability to issue distinct codes for each channel and then evaluate how each code performs based on redemption. This can inform future decisions on where to focus marketing efforts for maximum effectiveness. You may not know all of your guests as individuals yet, but you are able to assess which coupons drive visits, as well as the purchase behavior of the guests who redeem them.

You can also use insights from your loyalty program to enhance your coupon strategy. If you know that certain messaging or promotions have been successful with the segments that visit less frequently, those same promotions are likely to work on your unknown customers as well.

Coupons can be a powerful tool when used correctly.   

To learn more about how to make coupons part of your marketing strategy, check out our on-demand webinar, “Not Your Grandma’s Coupons – Using Coupons to Reach More Guests.”