Your loyal customers are the lifeblood of your business. So, when a customer changes their routine and stops visiting your place of business, will you know? And do you have a system in place to entice them to come back?
Most brick-and-mortar business owners have no way of knowing when a once-loyal customer has stopped returning, and clearly no way to persuade them to come back.
When you have a customer who is at risk of never coming back, wouldn't it be great to be able to reach out and invite them to come back? With the level of competition out there, it doesn't take much to shift consumer routines. That change in routine can result in an at-risk customer becoming a once-was customer.
The hard truth is that when your customer isn't dining at your establishment, they are dining somewhere else. But this doesn't have to end with a lost customer. There are solutions, like Bloom Intelligence, that let you know when this is happening in order to reconnect with the customer before it becomes an issue.
The best way for brick-and-mortar business owners to understand customer behavior is by utilizing WiFi analytics and marketing automation.
Marketing Automation Brings Ghosting Customers Back
Marketing automation makes marketing efforts much more efficient and productive. Using triggers or scheduled automation, marketing tasks are made much easier, especially with tasks that may slip through if we had to rely on our memory. When it comes to utilizing automated marketing to engage at-risk customers, WiFi analytics can provide powerful insight.
Imagine having the ability to passively send a quick note to your at-risk customer without having to even recognize they are at risk of churning:
"We haven't seen you for a while and we miss you. We hope everything is well with you and look forward to seeing you soon! We'd like to offer you a free appetizer with your next meal. Hope to see you soon! Your friends at...."
More importantly than what the message says – and content does matter – is letting your customers know they are valued, and they matter to you. This is a great way to stay top-of-mind with your customers. There is absolute truth in that proverb that states, "out of sight, out of mind." So, make sure you have a way to bring yourself back into their mind should they begin to stray.
This means keeping close tabs on every single one of our customers. Unfortunately, most business owners and operators do not have the time or resources to manually keep up with such a difficult tactic. Now the need for automation begins to take on a lot more clarity.
Recognizing the At-Risk Customer
Even if you are a single location family-owned diner, you may believe you are small enough and have a volume manageable enough to recognize at-risk patrons on your own. However, if you consider the lost revenue from one loyal customer, it can be significant. What is the lifetime value of a customer? How many meals will they purchase over time and what does that mean to your bottom line?
If you are the owner or marketing director of a franchise restaurant, you operate multiple locations, and losing customers can result in a much more significant revenue loss.
In either scenario, you may actually not have the luxury of being unaware of customer behavior when your competition is becoming more aware and pro-active at enticing your customers back to them.
Regardless of the metrics you choose to track your customers, from spending, to engagement activity, recognizing pattern changes and possible churning is the biggest red flag that demands attention.
And therein lies the needle in the haystack.
If you serve 1,000 weekly customers alone, that's 4,000 customers a month that someone must scour over to locate very specific trends, omissions and other behavioral benchmarks. Having a WiFi marketing and analytics solution to show you exactly what is happening within any time period with customers churning, frequency of visits, overall churn-rates, and then having the ability to impact their behavior to result in positive business trends.
The only realistic answer to this mountainous issue is...automation. Realistically there is no way to accurately and feasibly employ the manpower and, frankly, the intelligence to manage such data quantities. This is the beauty of the magic of automation.
You can now quickly and easily build an automated marketing campaign tailored to your at-risk customers and your operational practices. And it will become the safety net of your business.
There will be some customers that just can't be saved, that’s just the nature of business. But consider the many who can be saved and the impact it will have on your bottom line. That safety net will bring back those who can be saved – and that is worth every penny.
Customer Retention
When it comes to retaining customers, automation can help us do things much more quickly and efficiently than we could without automation. With a WiFi marketing and restaurant analytics solution like Bloom Intelligence, you can have the ability to see whether your customers have been to your location recently, regardless of whether they log into your WiFi or not.
This gives you a distinct advantage over your competition. Not only will you have accurate, reliable customer data, you’ll be able to be proactive in your marketing and operations decisions. And you’ll be able to use tangible customer data to analyze and track the effects of those decisions.
Real-Life Case Study
With a enterprise WiFi marketing system like Bloom Intelligence, retailers and restaurateurs now have the ability to measure their customers’ behavior at their locations and build rich customer profiles. So, when it comes to recognizing and rescuing at-risk customers, physical locations employing a WiFi marketing and analytics platform have a distinct advantage.
Save up to 38% of your at-risk customers using Bloom Intelligence’s enterprise WiFi marketing software. For more details about this valuable feature, and to read a real-life customer success report, click on the banner below.
If you’d like to see the Bloom WiFi marketing and customer intelligence platform in action, and discover how you can grow your business using WiFi marketing growth tools, schedule a free demo or call 727-877-8181.