Showing appreciation for your customers is a great way to create loyal customers. Those loyal customers, as you probably already know, are going to keep coming back to your eatery and they will spread the word about how well you take care of them. How can you foster this loyalty? If you have been wracking your brain trying to come up with ways to let your customers know how much you appreciate them, consider starting a birthday or anniversary club. It’s easy to do, and it is a cost effective way of getting people to come back to your restaurant.
You can choose to have a birthday club or an anniversary club. You might even want to have both. Offer a signup sheet for people where they can add their birthday or their anniversary (or both if you chose that route). They will also need to provide their email address. Make sure that you let them know that you aren’t going to do anything with their email other than put it in your own database to send them specials. A week or two before the event, send them coupons. Make sure that the coupons are good enough to entice them to come into the restaurant and redeem them.
Some good ideas include a free meal when buying one of the same price or greater. Free dessert or free drink coupons are also nice. Let them know in the email that they don’t have to redeem the coupon on their actual birthday or anniversary. Give them up to a week or two to redeem the coupons.
Even if you are giving them a free meal, you will find that you are able to make money because they will likely bring in a few friends with them on the big day. When those new people come in, make sure that you give them the opportunity to sign up as well. You want as many people to sign up as possible.
You will find that the birthday and anniversary club will grow and become very popular in the community. More and more people will start signing up, and that means that you are going to have more people in your restaurant. It is a simple and painless way to promote your restaurant and to show your customers just how much you really appreciate their business.
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Hi Daniel,
I actually just posted this comment on another one of your articles but it seems fitting here as well.
There have been two services our restaurant has used very effectively to show our customers appreciation.
We started using a constant contact type of service to try and keep our dispensary in the mind of our clients. The service is called Textagram (http://textagram.com/). It’s pretty neat what they allow us to do. We started collecting our clients cell phone #’s and birthdays through promotional forms and then input that list into our account at textagram. Then when our clients birthday comes up textagram sends them a text message that we customize automatically the morning of their birthday. Our message tells them that if they come in within 3 days of their birthday we’ll give them a 50% discount on their meal. They almost always come in! We can also schedule a promotion we do once a month and send a blast to all of our clients cell phone’s informing them. We’ve found this form of promotions to be a lot more effective and personal than emails. Every once and awhile we’ll have a client that doesn’t want to receive texts from us so we just remove them from the list.
Something else we use is The Birthday Company (http://birthdayco.com/). With this service we enter our clients names, addresses and birthdays into our account and The Birthday Company mails them a card and or small chocolate gift that appears as if it were sent by us, with our own signature, logo, etc. We receive great feedback from our long returning customers with this service.
We’ve been a lot of work into keeping our clients and these two services have proven to be the most effective of the non standard methods.