TouchBistro Loyalty and Marketing: How to Set Up Your First Programs and Promotions

A loyalty program can help you create customers for life – if you set it up correctly. But as a busy restaurateur, you need a hassle-free solution. That’s why TouchBistro Loyalty and Marketing make it easy to drive repeat visits. Whether you’re new to these products or you’re looking to get more benefits from them, we’ll show you how to do exactly that.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• Different types of Loyalty programs you can set up, ranging from simple to sophisticated
• Various kinds of Marketing promotions, starting with the first promotion you should run to ongoing email marketing

Prefer to have our team set it up for you?

Using TouchBistro Loyalty and Marketing Together

Food is nourishment and fuel – you know this well as a restaurateur. In the same way, a restaurant loyalty program is fuel for your business. With the TouchBistro Loyalty customer relationship management (CRM) and rewards platform, you can increase customer lifetime value, and in turn, boost your revenue. 

How? TouchBistro Loyalty enables you to create a seamless guest experience that will keep your customers returning – and spending more. TouchBistro Loyalty allows you to set up custom loyalty programs, multiple reward options, and a branded customer web app to help you deliver a guest experience worthy of a second serving!

But TouchBistro Loyalty shouldn’t be the only tool in your arsenal. TouchBistro Marketing pairs with TouchBistro Loyalty like surf and turf. It’s an easy-to-use marketing platform that lets you automate custom campaigns and promotions to help you keep your business top of mind. This way, you can engage customers with the right message at exactly the right time to drive traffic to your venue. 

The two products integrate seamlessly with one another to give you a 360-degree marketing solution. Start by collecting purchase data from diners on orders placed, average spend, last visit, and even birthdays to create custom diner segments for dedicated promotions. Then, use this data to create targeted campaigns. Together, TouchBistro Loyalty and Marketing help you drive awareness, engagement, and repeat visits.

TouchBistro Loyalty Programs to Set Up

You want to build customer relationships that last. Making the most out of TouchBistro Loyalty will help you do exactly that.

TouchBistro Loyalty provides everything you need to reward and retain your customers – all in one place. Once you’re up and running with the software, the best way to start leveraging it is by setting up either a spend-based or an item-based loyalty program.

Spend-Based Programs

Spend-based loyalty programs are a simple way to reward your guests and entice them to return to your restaurant. 

With a spend-based loyalty program, diners earn points based on the amount they spend at your restaurant over time. These points can then be redeemed for rewards. That’s all there is to it!

If you’re new to the world of loyalty programs, spend-based programs are a great place to start because they’re incredibly straightforward to set up in TouchBistro Loyalty – a big plus when you have numerous other tasks on your plate.

Spend-based programs are also easy for your guests to understand how to use. This is key, because guests are much more likely to engage with a loyalty program that’s simple to understand and use on a regular basis than one that is incredibly complicated.

Getting Started with Spend-Based Programs

The simplest way to get started with spend-based programs is to offer a tiered program under a name that has a clear meaning, like ‘Loyalty Points Club’. The idea is that as guests continue to spend more money at your restaurant over time, they’ll move from one tier to another and earn greater rewards. 

For example, you can set up a program in TouchBistro Loyalty under the ‘Guest Engagement’ → ‘Loyalty Programs’ tab that offers customers one point for every dollar spent.

Once a guest reaches 150 points (which in this case, means they’ve spent $150 in total at your restaurant), they get $5 off their next meal. Once they reach 300 points, they get a bigger reward of $10 off, and so on. You can enter a description for these discounts that says ‘Get $5 Off Your Next Check!’ to clearly communicate the benefit to your members.

Double Points

If you’re ready to offer a slightly more advanced reward program, you can try setting up a double points program with TouchBistro Loyalty.

A double points program is simply another type of spend-based program. With a double points program, diners can earn twice the amount of points during specific times of day or specific days of the week. The idea is that if a guest visits your restaurant during this time, they’ll earn two points for every dollar spent, instead of one point.

Getting Started with Double Points Programs

Double points programs are particularly useful if you want to boost traffic and sales during certain times of day, like 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. In this case, you could call the program your ‘Lunchtime Loyalty Program’ and set it up so that it’s only active during specific mid-day hours, incentivizing working professionals in your neighborhood to come in for lunch. Or, you might prefer to offer double points during certain days of the week, like Tuesdays. 

One way to choose the best time to run a double points program is by looking at your POS reports to see when slumps in sales typically occur. This way, you can make a data-driven decision about when to offer double points to encourage more traffic during slower times.

Under the ‘Guest Engagement’ → ‘Loyalty Programs’ → ‘Create a New Program’ tab, instead of choosing the ‘daily’ option to run the program, you can select particular days and times to make the program active.

Prefer to have our team set it up for you?

Item-Based Programs

If you’ve already mastered spend-based programs, you might be ready to try setting up item-based loyalty programs in TouchBistro Loyalty.

With an item-based loyalty program, diners earn rewards based on items purchased. This is similar to the digital punch card programs you see at Starbucks or Subway, where if a customer buys 9 items, they get the 10th for free.

Getting Started with Item-Based Programs

For instance, you could set up a Burger Club where members get their 10th burger free. You can make this program active every day of the week, all day. The system will then track how many burgers a guest has purchased, and automatically offer them the free burger when they reach their 10th burger. 

Whether you choose to go with a Burger Club, Beer Club, or Breakfast Club, using words like “club” to name the offer is a smart marketing move that helps to draw guests in because this kind of language evokes a sense of community. Customers are also highly familiar with these types of loyalty programs, which is important because straightforward marketing sells.

Keep in mind that the reward item you choose to offer can be different from the qualifying item. For example, guests could buy five lunch items and get a dessert for free. The TouchBistro Loyalty system has the flexibility to accommodate this.

TouchBistro Marketing Promotions to Try

Loyalty programs are a great way to start building a customer fan base. But if your restaurant uses both TouchBistro Loyalty and Marketing, you can supercharge customer engagement.

TouchBistro Marketing enables you to take the data you’ve collected with TouchBistro Loyalty and leverage it to create targeted offers that give your guests exactly what they want, when they want it. 

The biggest benefit of TouchBistro Marketing is that the CRM allows you to create custom diner segments, which means creating groups of diners based on specific behaviors (i.e. diners who have visited in the last 30 days) or transaction data (i.e. diners who have ordered your veggie burger). The option to segment diners into groups based on different criteria means that the combination of campaigns you can set up is basically unlimited. 

Here’s how it works: you can combine multiple parameters to isolate specific customers. For instance, you can target diners who’ve visited your restaurant twice in the last month and who’ve spent more than $20 during each visit. This helps you deepen relationships with your guests and drive engagement by offering them promotions that are relevant to them and their preferences.

Let’s walk through two key ways you can start using TouchBistro Marketing to stay ahead of the competition.

Prefer to have our team set it up for you?

Sign-Up Bonus

TouchBistro Marketing is a powerful product, but it’s most useful if you have robust, clean data in the CRM. If you’re just getting started and don’t have any data to work with yet, running a sign-up bonus campaign is the best place to begin.

A sign-up bonus campaign is a promotion that gives diners a special offer for signing up to your loyalty program or your marketing list.

Getting Started with Sign-Up Bonus Promotions

For example, you could sweeten the deal (literally) and offer a free dessert or a 10% off coupon to guests who sign up for your loyalty program.

Here’s how it works: as soon as a guest signs up for your loyalty program (either in-venue or on your website), they’ll receive an email with a coupon to redeem their free dessert. At the same time, their information will be entered into your CRM, allowing you to start gathering data on their behaviors and preferences, as well as other details like their birthday, so you can learn more about what your diners want and what kind of offers will resonate most.

Email Marketing Campaigns

Restaurant email marketing is a profitable investment for your business. On average, for every dollar a company spends on email marketing, they earn $36 back, according to Litmus. So, how do you get started?

Once you have a bit of customer data in your CRM, you can use TouchBistro Marketing to begin setting up more advanced promotions like email marketing based on your guests’ specific behaviors.

Email marketing promotions are offers that can be emailed to your guests manually, or they can be automated to send when your guests trigger specific criteria, like not visiting for 30 days. This will ensure your restaurant always stays top of mind with your customers, so they’ll come back again and again.

You can then monitor the open and click-through rates of each campaign to get to know your audience better and to find the right messaging for future email campaigns.

Getting Started with Email Marketing

Here are just simple email campaigns ideas you can try with TouchBistro Marketing:

Under the ‘Guest Engagement’ → ‘CRM’ tab in TouchBistro Loyalty, create a marketing automation that sends an email with a promotion for a free dessert to all customers who have visited your restaurant five or more times in the past year. (Tip: You can use the ‘Guest Search’ function to find customers who fit these parameters by filtering for total visits). This is an excellent way to show your appreciation to your biggest fans.

Or, you could send restaurant emails announcing your new menu and offering a 10% discount on an item to anyone who has dined at your venue in the last 30 days, filtering by date range. This is a smart move to re-engage guests who have recently visited your restaurant. With either of these ideas, be sure to include information in the email that lets your customers know why they’re receiving the promotion (as a reward for their repeat business!).

After you send the promotion, the reward associated with it will show up in the guest’s Customer Web App. All you have to do is link the web app to the email campaign in the back end of the TouchBistro Marketing system, and the customer can simply click a button in the email itself to redeem their reward.

With a few easy campaign ideas under your belt, you’re now ready to start using TouchBistro Loyalty and TouchBistro Marketing together to encourage repeat visits and higher spend with powerful programs based on customer data. It’s time to get creative!

Prefer to have our team set it up for you?