Loyalty and customer marketing now work seamlessly within Lightspeed Restaurant POS, so merchants have all their sales and marketing in one place.
What does it feel like to be a loyal customer?
We are business owners, venue managers, marketers - sure. But we’re also consumers ourselves. We know what it feels like to be loyal to a brand. When you boil it down, we like to feel favored. We like to have a buddy who’ll slide us a free beer at the bar, or a friend to keep those shoes on hold for us a liiiitttle bit longer than protocol would usually permit.
We like to feel like someone has bent the rules, just a little bit, just for us.
At its essence, this is what a loyalty program delivers. Although rather than being a quick favor under the table, it’s a calculated & measured marketing tactic - implemented to increase ROI, not hinder it.
Our regular customers are our friends, and the VIP deals we give them incentivize their repeat business - so they come back to us, not to a merchant down the road. The more valuable the customer, the more points they earn, and the better or more frequent the deals.
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Are loyalty programs worth it for hospitality businesses?
Like any industry, the hospitality sector has nuances and unique needs that business owners must consider before committing to a loyalty program service or app.
Hospitality staff will know the pain of waiting for a customer to sign up to their database while other hungry and un-caffeinated customers are waiting impatiently in line. In many cases, the effort just won’t feel worthwhile.
Loyalty software built for hospitality will be designed with these pain points in mind - for example, you’ll be able to have a QR code at the counter to allow customers to scan a code and enter their details within seconds. Moreover, your software will let you know the value of each and every person who signs up - making it easy to show staff why it’s important for customers to join your database.
Success Story: Pinjarra Bakery
Increase regulars with rewards. Pinjarra Bakery encourages regulars with a rewards program that has 58% of customers visit at least twice and avg. visits of 5 per month. Their reward program has generated over 5000 redemptions and over 40K in revenue.
There’s also a suitability test: ‘what kind of loyalty program is best for my business?’
For a cafe with no online store, a simple coffee card might be more effective and easy to manage than loyalty program software. However, for a multi-site cafe that also sells beans, filter apparatus, and branded coffee mugs from an online store, that loyalty software starts to make much more sense. Taking a step further, a large global chain might even invest in a custom loyalty program app - an expensive option generally not worthwhile for SMEs.
How do I know a loyalty program will work for my hospitality business?
Before you commit to a loyalty program, you probably want to know:
- Can I be sure it will work?
- How will I know when it’s working?
- How do I measure the success of a loyalty program?
One of the biggest challenges for business owners and marketers is calculating the ROI of marketing efforts. If you’ve ever used Google Analytics or other tools to try to attribute revenue to campaigns, you’ll know how frustrating it can be to pinpoint what’s actually bringing in revenue. While a digital ad might be easy to track, anything more nebulous, like “brand equity” or “customer loyalty”, is much more difficult.
So, how can you know your loyalty program is delivering a return on your investment? That is, how can you know when your customers are spending more because of your loyalty program?
For this, you need closed-loop attribution. Closed-loop attribution means that you ‘close the loop’ between marketing and sales - everything is tracked and measured centrally through seamlessly integrated sales and marketing tech.
In a closed-loop system, your customer takes center stage. Rather than piecemeal data spread across different systems and spreadsheets, every activity is tracked and recorded to a neatly organized customer profile. (For you, that means less clutter, less admin, and no more importing and exporting of customer lists.)
Loyalty is just one part of your broader marketing strategy
When you operate a loyalty program within a closed-loop system, you get total visibility over what specific combinations of loyalty tactics and marketing campaigns work best and who your most valuable customers are. That is, you get a broader understanding of how your loyalty program operates in conjunction with the rest of your marketing efforts.
If this is sounding a bit technical, here’s the crux of it:
Every SMS message delivered, email opened, discount code redeemed, purchase made… it’s all there. This is extremely powerful. Using this data, you can segment your customers into groups such as most valuable, most likely to convert from an email, top brand ambassadors… and so much more.
Using these segments, you can deliver targeted, personalized and highly effective marketing campaigns that drive repeat sales and increase revenue.
We don’t want to make false promises but we will say this: customer loyalty is a tried and tested marketing tactic. If your business is the right fit, it will work.
Close the loop with Lightspeed Marketing & Loyalty, powered by Marsello.
You talked, we listened. We heard that you needed a faster, simpler way to sign customers up at POS. Now, staff members can simply capture the customers’ mobile number, and they'll receive an SMS to complete their account - reducing time at POS and keeping this as quick as possible. Alternatively, you can display a QR code to help customers sign up themselves from the venue or an event. Customers can also save their points card to their phone, making it easier for them to scan upon each visit.
We also heard that merchants are tired of having so many different platforms to manage - often requiring regular manual imports and exports of customer lists. So in our latest release, Lightspeed Restaurant merchants can now close the loop between sales and marketing. Lightspeed Marketing & Loyalty, powered by Marsello, is designed to help hospitality merchants increase revenue through repeat business and customer loyalty.
What this means? Lightspeed Restaurant (O-Series) merchants can now use one single platform for all of their POS data, email & SMS campaigns, marketing automations, Facebook ad tracking (using Facebook sync), loyalty program activities, Google Review management and more.
In one single place, merchants will have access to customer data from end-to-end. From a customer’s first coffee to their repeat business and ongoing referrals. Merchants can easily see the return on all their marketing efforts, check their average customer lifetime value, and so, so much more.
Now that’s closing the loop.
