Keeping your loyal customers coming through your doors is the lifeblood of your business. However, no matter what kind of business you manage or own, some of those loyal customers will choose not to return. This is known as customer attrition, or customer churn, and it should be kept under close watch.
When a customer changes their habit and stops visiting your place of business, will you know? And if so, do you have the means to entice them to come back? If you were able to identify a customer who is at risk of not returning, wouldn't it be great to reach out, engage them, and invite them back?
Competition is fierce, especially in the hospitality industry, and it doesn't take much to shift a loyal customer's routine. Restaurants are in the business of becoming part of each patron's routine. Any change in that can quickly result in an at-risk customer becoming a “once-was” customer.
The simple truth is, if your customer isn't dining at your establishment, they are dining somewhere else. But this doesn't have to end up with you losing that customer. There are solutions to understanding when this happens, allowing you to reconnect with the customer before it becomes an issue. One powerful, yet easy way to understanding and shaping customer behavior is by utilizing WiFi analytics and marketing automation.
WiFi Marketing Automation to the Rescue
Marketing automation is a tool that can make your marketing efforts much more efficient and productive. Using behavior triggers or scheduled automation to send marketing messages, you can make strategies and tasks much easier. Automation is helpful when it's set up correctly, especially with tasks that may slip through the cracks if we had to rely on our memory alone.
When it comes to utilizing automated marketing to engage at-risk customers, WiFi analytics can provide powerful insight. Imagine having the ability to automatically send a quick note to your at-risk customers:
"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...."
The ability to identify at-risk customers and send them a quick message or email inviting them back becomes completely possible through the use of WiFi marketing and analytics. More importantly than what it says (and content does matter), is letting your customers know you value them. It is also a great way to stay top-of-mind, as there is absolute truth in that proverb that states, "out of sight, out of mind."
So that means you have to keep tabs on all of our customers? Yes, to the best of our ability. Now the need for automation begins to take on more clarity.
WiFi Analytics Helps Customer Retention
When it comes to retaining customers, automation can help us with doing things better and faster than we could without automation - at least realistically speaking. With WiFi marketing systems, we have the ability to see whether our customer has been to our location recently, regardless of whether they log in or not. So, when it comes to recognizing and retaining customers you immediately have a distinct advantage. We only need to examine a real-case scenario to see how this applies.
Recognizing the At-Risk Customer
Even if you manage a single-location family-owned diner, you may believe you are "small enough" and have a volume manageable enough to recognize those at-risk patrons. But that may not truly be the case.
First, 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 the course of time and what does that mean to your establishment?
Further, if you are the owner or marketing director of a franchise restaurant chain, you have multiple locations, and losing customers results in substantial revenue loss. You may not have that luxury of being unaware of customer behavior when your competition is becoming more aware and proactive at enticing your loyal customers back to them.
Bloom Intelligence At-Risk Customer Trigger
Bloom Intelligence allows users to quickly create a beautiful message that they can send to their at-risk customers. Then, a marketing campaign can be easily configured to send that message to any customer the system deems as being at-risk of churning.
Bloom uses advanced algorithm sets to identify customers who are at-risk of churning or not coming back to your restaurant or retail location. Users are seeing as much as 38% of their at-risk customers returning – many of whom they would have never realized were churning.
For a real-life case study, and more details about how to save your at-risk customers, download our free customer success story, or simply click on the banner below.