Major brands are looking at nontraditional formats like airports, grocery and campuses, requiring marketers to re-evaluate their existing campaign strategy. Brittany Maroney, senior manager, product marketing at Punchh, explains how a brand can thrive with innovative loyalty tactics.
Over the last few months, the hospitality landscape has experienced a seismic shift as major brands like Wendy's, Dunkin', and IHOP announced that they are going to forego traditional brick and mortar locations for more nontraditional sites, such as airports, convenience stores, grocery stores and campuses. They are carving out new definitions of growth by redefining real estate tactics, distribution models and targeting audiences in spaces considered highly irregular pre-pandemic. What's more, many brands are finding that they are not only thriving in these non-traditional formats, but it's also allowed them to expand at an increasingly faster pace.
Much of this trend is emerging from changing consumer preferences and behaviors, creating an evolution in how brands consider sites and growth strategies. As demand for delivery and carryout skyrocketed during the height of the COVID pandemic, restaurants were forced to adapt with operational modifications implemented for sanitation and social distancing, as well as operational changes that leaned in on a relatively contactless, entirely disposable, and modernized experience.
Ultimately, convenience won out during the pandemic.
High-quality, nontraditional restaurants began to appear at unique locations such as airports, convenience stores, and grocery stores, all to capture new and existing guests within these bustling environments. These new nontraditional restaurant locations became a crucial part of many brand strategies, allowing them to penetrate trade areas traditionally off-limits.
With this evolution came the dilemma of continuing to attract and retain customers within these unique venues. These formats require a lot of product differentiation and innovative customer experiences to thrive. The answer is simple for those willing to evolve their loyalty offering and engage their customers in a whole new way:
Loyalty at day 1
Nontraditional restaurant sites often are within centralized locations of high traffic but also have small footprints. This could be at the main entrance of a grocery store or at the back of a convenience store. Despite the foot traffic, these locations do have challenges, including the possibility that your concept can fade into the hustle and bustle of its surroundings. Do so by crafting a unique customer experience that supports this new consumer's on-the-go lifestyle.
One way to do this is to integrate loyalty at the first stage of interaction, either through crew training or self-ordering kiosks integrated with your loyalty program. From there you can begin delivering personalized offers or promotions targeted to that site, making it the destination, as opposed to the backup plan. This will help you create frequency until your customer has developed habitual spending.
You also can drive promotions through your loyalty program by reinforcing this behavior with tier-based promotions that reward users for spend and unique visits. Delivering loyalty from day one gets new and existing customers into your marketing ecosystem and will help you deliver engagement throughout their lifecycle.
Personalize offers that wow
While tiered structures and personalization will help you reward your frequent customers, it may not be enough to truly promote loyalty from infrequent customers. For that, you need to wow your customers. Do so by offering surprise and delight offers through your loyalty program. These can be provided to specific segments based on their purchasing history but can be randomized to truly be unique to each guest.
Ensure that these have longer expiration terms so that guests have the time to frequent your location and redeem, particularly in the case that you are not in an area they traditionally frequent.
You also can incorporate text messaging into your loyalty program to help geotarget guests and offer them incentives in real-time. Say, while they are shopping within the grocery environment. By respecting customers' busy lifestyles you can provide them convenience and ease of entry into dining with you.
Add channels that offer convenience
Nontraditional spaces often support a segment on the go, like university campuses, which make convenience and speed a necessity. Expand your ordering options into new channels, like online ordering or curbside pickup, technology that improves the ordering experience and offers a quick and easy way to grab and go.
Add in options like a contactless payment that afford customers the ability to pay prior to pickup or install self-service kiosks that allow consumers the ability to manage their own order entry. Ultimately, all of these solutions can feed into your loyalty system, offering you insights into your customer's unique behaviors, which will allow you to target them with customizable campaigns that deliver impactful results.
Up your listening game
Last but not least, ensure your tech stack is integrated to create an ecosystem for the guest while pulling in as much customer data as possible. Initially, it may seem incomprehensible to fully evaluate data from multiple sources over thousands of guests, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
Each and every user is an individual customer with their own set of motivations and reasons for behaving in a particular way. The information they provide you can truly make or break your profitability in this new era of personalization. Understanding their behavior is the best way to truly optimize your nontraditional site in terms of staffing, order guides, offer management, and channel throughput. It'll also help you pull the right levers for your loyalty program, now and in the future.
With untraditional spaces comes a whole new set of challenges but with those challenges comes the opportunity to build a truly advanced customer acquisition and retention system. One that connects with customers in the digital era and provides the convenience they desire.
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October 20, 2021 at 05:00PM
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4 ways loyalty can drive nontraditional growth strategies - QSRweb.com
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