From increased competition to navigating social media trends, understanding customers is essential to QSR loyalty programmes. Our blog examines how.
With ever-increasing competition in the QSR (quick service restaurant) space, brands are increasingly focusing on customer loyalty to maintain and grow market share. Of course, brand loyalty is nothing new across the retail sector, but there are myriad ways of achieving it in today’s increasingly convenience-led environment. From reward schemes and direct customer engagement to novel menu items and canny social media campaigns and advertising, QSR loyalty programmes are competing on multiple fronts to capture customer loyalty. The customer experience is essential to this, with QSRs honing in on customer insights to deliver positive experiences to drive repeat visits.
This goes beyond just understanding what their favourite order is. Do you know who they are? Factors such as gender, age, employment and affluence inform trends such as which type of QSR they are most likely to frequent. Do you know where they are? Understanding where they live, work and socialise, then where they are in the digital world in terms of social media platforms and apps they use. Then, crucially, do QSR loyalty programmes know how to target them? It’s one thing gaining customer insights, another thing acting upon them effectively.
Loyalty, in an increasingly congested market with new entrants competing for the same customer base, has never been more important to QSRs. Here, we’ll take a closer look at achieving customer insights and effectively acting upon them to build brand loyalty at QSRs.
Identify your customer
Understanding the demographic data around a QSR is the first step to achieving this. By diving into granular local data, it is possible to identify who lives there and who they are. This covers their profile across gender, age, affluence, spending habits, digital trends and overarching lifestyle habits. Are they likely to visit and/or order from a QSR? If so, which type and how frequently?
In urban areas, the local demographic can change rapidly, meaning that it’s important to regularly monitor what’s happening around a QSR and be agile to any changes. What works today won’t necessarily be best tomorrow. This is why understanding customers is so crucial for QSR loyalty programmes.
Identifying customers helps brands to build up a knowledge base that will inform their loyalty programmes. With so many marketing channels available, knowing your customer is paramount to effectively targeting them. It pays to know your customer and take advantage of marketing routes that offer them a bespoke experience.
CACI provides demographic data across the UK to a multitude of organisations. You can read about our work with Chopstix here. They all need to understand the same thing: who lives near their services and who would benefit from them. By being able to identify customers around their sites, QSRs can begin to strategically plan loyalty programmes based on tangible local insights, not just overarching industry trends. By having such insights, QSR loyalty programmes can differentiate themselves from their competitors by providing more targeted and bespoke experiences to customers.
Know where to find them
QSRs need to know where their customers are in-person and digitally. Where do they live and work? What websites, social media and apps do they use? Combining such data with the knowledge of who they are, the personal insights become far more tangible and can be utilised to effectively target customers.
This falls under missions, the reasons why customers visit restaurants, and meeting them where they are, at the right moment, via the right marketing channels. For example, a customer is probably unlikely to order fried chicken in the morning, but they might be tempted outside of their usual dining routine at the end of a night out. The right messaging, at the right time, can be hugely effective to influence this decision.
This can be built upon using existing data from across a QSR’s customer base. If, for example, you have an app through which customers order, sending notifications at the right time helps, as does sending offers to customers who haven’t ordered in a while. This helps with the overarching customer experience and can be further built upon with seamless ordering, convenience and rewards.
How can QSRs energise and excite customers? Reaching customers where they are is integral to this, with bespoke social media campaigns, games, promotions and in-app experiences essential to this process. If customers feel excited by a brand, this is a major step towards building brand equity and loyalty in their eyes.
A real-world example of this is the work with Dominos. CACI’s expertise in customer experience and transformation supported Domino’s to effectively target customers with the appropriate pizzas and offers, crucially delivered at the right time. While Domino’s defined and created the offers themselves, CACI enabled and supported the delivery of these offers to the right audiences. CACI also integrated demographic, wealth, and catchment data into its customised solutions, enabling Domino’s to understand who its customers were and how their locations related to their sites.
Understand how to target them
Knowing how to target customers is essential. You have the info, but what do you want and need to achieve from your QSR loyalty programme? The industry has been awash with innovation. From in-store games to product placement deals with major film releases, to reward cards and loyalty apps, there are several routes to market and several media through which to activate them. It’s all about standing out in a crowded market by offering unique and captivating experiences that drive repeat engagement.
What works for one customer, however, won’t necessarily work for another. This is why it’s so important to gather relevant information on them, from who they are to where they are.
It’s also vital that QSRs carefully consider what the aims of any loyalty programme are. Running them can often be expensive. For example, if it’s decided that an app is the right way to go, then the build, innovation, cost and maintenance within that infrastructure needs to be carefully considered upfront.
Revisiting loyalty programmes frequently is equally important. In the QSR space, we generally see from our demographic data among Millennial and Gen Z customers that there is a desire for novelty. If your customer base widely consists of such customers, then partnerships, menu changes and competitions can be successful in building loyalty. For others, well-timed promotional offers and reward schemes may be more effective.
CACI works with several QSR brands to regularly review their loyalty programmes. We support them in understanding what is and isn’t working, whilst considering the bigger picture of what needs to be achieved within available budgets. Do you need an app? Strategic partnerships with influencers? Social media campaigns? Traditional media campaigns? Our data and expert team help QSRs to cut through the noise and make informed, strategic decisions based on desired outcomes.
Getting your QSR loyalty programme right
Loyalty isn’t a random reaction from customers it is a commercial imperative for QSRs in achieving long-term growth. Of course, there needs to be a baseline satisfaction with the delivery of product offerings and in-store locations and settings. If they don’t like the product, they’re unlikely to become repeat customers. Beyond that, however, there are myriad interaction points upon which brands can stand out from the crowd and offer unique experiences to customers.
Different QSRs are at different stages of this journey. For brands operating a limited number of sites , building an app and investing in multi-channel marketing activities isn’t viable. For multi-site and franchise QSRs, the situation is very different. It comes back to understanding who the customer is, where they are and how a QSR can offer them an experience that retains them when they consider visiting a site in future.
Ultimately, it’s a case of activating the right insights in the right channels, at the right time. CACI’s data and expertise support QSR loyalty programme wherever they are on the journey. Be that new entrant to the UK market interested in how your loyalty programme will succeed in a new market, revisiting a long-established loyalty programme or those looking at expanding or even starting out with a loyalty programme, we can help.
By equipping you with unparalleled consumer insights and consultancy on loyalty activation, we can support you in your loyalty programme, in standing out from the crowd and in establishing a programme that supports your business needs.
Discover more about driving customer loyalty in your business. Get in touch today.