At first glance, the connection between a restaurant’s loyalty program and any customer-specific promotions it offers may be unclear. But understanding how the two function differently is crucial: Loyalty-driven programs offer restaurants a more limited scope of strategies, whereas personalization can include loyalty and so much more; in a nutshell, loyalty is just a slice of the whole personalization pie.
Therefore, personalization efforts can offer a more holistic, more robust approach to consumer recruitment and retention.
Personalization and loyalty: how they stack up
So, other than being wider in scope, how does personalization differ from loyalty?
In a nutshell, loyalty is revenue-focused, whereas tailored promotions are profit-focused. Restaurants’ loyalty programs generally offer the same promotion to all customers regardless of purchasing habits: Both the daily customer and the occasional visitor receive the same buy-two-get-one-free offer, for example. While this promotion may convince the occasional visitor to make a purchase at the restaurant, the daily customer likely would have come anyway—and happily paid full price.
Rather than merely seeking to maximize sales, promotions personalized to each customer’s preferences and purchasing habits maximizes profit. And to create these personalized promotions, restaurateurs must find ways to capture and interpret key consumer data.
Meeting in the middle
This isn’t to say, however, that personalized promotions and loyalty programs are mutually exclusive. Integrations between the two are often a great strategy.
Some of the restaurant industry’s biggest players are already taking steps to better personalize their loyalty programs; McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s are currently testing loyalty programs through which they seek to capture more information about their customers.
Utilizing consumer data is more important than ever for big and small operators alike. Not only is recouping revenue lost to the pandemic a key focus, but the boom in third-party delivery app usage has also put an obstacle between restaurateurs and their customers; third-party apps are the ones receiving the data, and key insights become even more scarce for the restaurants themselves.
Practical applications
For operators new to the practice of using consumer data to tailor promotions, it can be difficult to know how to start moving toward a more personalized, profit-driven system. Fortunately, operators can work with the industry experts at GetUpside for proven results.
GetUpside generates promotions based on the passive collection of anonymized card information and does not use personally identifiable information. Accessible to consumers through the GetUpside app, GetUpside leverages connections with multiple high-quality brands on their platform, improving reach and retention across brands. What’s more, GetUpside offers proven results for customer acquisition and retention, as well as substantiated reports on increases in revenue and profitable transactions.
In addition to a consumer-facing mobile app, GetUpside offers integration capabilities, too. It works well with any restaurant’s existing loyalty program, and even removes the cost of the existing loyalty program from GetUpside promotions; operators never “double pay” for using GetUpside alongside other programs.
Importantly, GetUpside recognizes that revenue is not always profit. For that reason, GetUpside takes a share of the generated profit—not revenue—so that restaurateurs know a promotion will never cost them more than it profits them.
To learn more about how GetUpside can bring operators to the cutting edge of personalized promotions, visit https://try.getupside.com/winsight-newsletter.
This post is sponsored by GetUpside