Just a pleasant experience may not be sufficient to convert your existing customers to regulars, even if your food is scrumptious accompanied with warm services. Who wouldn’t like to draw more customers returning to your truck over and over again, here are few solid ways you can incorporate loyalty programs into your business.
1.The “Buy X, Get 1 Free” Loyalty Card
You may be very familiar with this type of loyalty card and it still exist for a reason. It works! Let it be a free burger or a pack of nasi lemak kosong, who doesn’t like being rewarded and recognized for being loyal? For contributing to multiple purchases.
The benefits are that it’s a physical reminder of your food truck. Doesn’t it feel great to see your customers flipping out your paper stamp card. They too will be reminded of the last meal they had from your food truck after seeing your card in their wallet.
Every stamp grows their anticipation. This is actually backed up by facts. Customers do get excited collecting stamps and witnessing the stamp filling up to the final spot.
This system does have its limitations. Limitation where business owners are not generous with that final reward. This makes your customers feel unappreciated. Hence, make sure you attach a heartfelt thank you to ensure that your customers doesn’t just feel like they are your financial gain but in fact in a steady relationship as well.
Another weakness of paper stamp card is obviously because it’s not digital. You as a business owner have to forcefully keep track of how many rewards you have given out, but worse of all you are missing out on powerful data that can bring your marketing strategy to the next level. Imagine using this data on your Instagram and Facebook followers.
2.Digitizing Stamp Card Loyalty Programs
Digital stamp card are significantly the better choice for food trucks operators. Rewards are now tracked through the mobile apps which acts like a personal identification card just for loyalty recognitions. This enables customer to claim their stamp’s every visit without having to keep up with a physical card.
This could be your next step in digitizing your business after setting up your Facebook and Instagram page. These digital stamp card doesn’t just empower your business but is extremely easy to use. The data you may collect from these digital dashboard with your stamp cards can be very impressive. Not only can you track precisely how many reward perks you’re giving out but you can now also decisively know how recent, frequent and how much they have spent at your food truck.
These customer data acquired is invaluable to even the smallest vendors. It enables you to develop a laser targeted data driven marketing campaign to loop in existing customers with campaigns such as marketing promotions, loyalty programs and menu to maximize customer satisfaction and sales.
3.Advanced Privileged Cards (Points Collection System)
The variety of loyalty programs you can get from digital platforms are in abundance. One which has gained popularity over the past few years in the points based loyalty programs. This system allows customers to earn and collect points based on how much they spent. With the collected points, they can then use it to redeem coupons predetermined by you as food truck business operator.
This approach gives your customers the flexibility. If they’re not a fan of nasi lemak, maybe they can instead redeem points on an order of mee goreng or nasi goreng.
Having a plethora of loyalty rewards isn’t the only benefit, but infusing personalized engagements is another key aspect a business owner should consider. If this interests you, you may look into following the below rules:
- Adopting a simple yet effective reward structure
- Offer an easily to achieve low hanging reward to demonstrate the system to customers
- Clarity is key, communicate point transparently and clearly to customers
Here’s another loyalty program best suited for food trucks as the setup is quick and simple especially with the right tool.
If you think that the quality of food that you serve from your food truck is comparable to those in cafes and restaurants, but your customers still tends to visit them more often, then consider using a Tiered Privilege card. This system allows customers to continually get rewarded with benefits of higher value in exchange for repeat spending. The higher tier they are, the better the recognition they achieve, making them feel special and appreciated.
Here’s and example on how you business can exploit this system:
- SILVER TIER (Spend up to RM100) : Free lemonade every visit
- GOLD TIER (Spend up to RM500) : 15% OFF with min. spending of RM30
- PLATINUM TIER (Spend up to RM1000) : 30% OFF with min. spending of RM30
This type of loyalty program is highly effective when you expect the interval between your customer return to be a lengthy one. If it requires your customers to be highly committed to purchasing from you hence making it less often you are able to reward the, the more long-term you have to plan for your customer retention strategy.
It is often said that if a retailer can induce customer loyalty through non monetary gains, loyalty of such lasts much longer. As a food truck business owner, you can try implementing this approach by perhaps donating a burger for every 5 burger purchased by a customer. You could even allow your customers to convert their points to purchase coupons for charity donations. Although this approach doesn’t provide your business any monetary gains, it sure does generate incredible brand loyalty, perhaps even making you the talk of the town.
Managing a loyalty program is all about continuous inputting effort towards it. Setting it up once and expecting your customer to start coming back instantly will not happen. Loyalty programs need continuous improvement and pivoting until you find the best angle for your specific customer needs.
If running a food truck business is already too overwhelming for you, you can try adopting Engage, a customer retention tool powered by artificial intelligence to help you better reward your customers with laser targeted accuracy.
With Engage, creating loyalty campaigns would not take you more than 10 minutes and if it doesn’t work for you, you can terminate it in an instance. Engage is specifically catered for Food truck businesses hence its ease of use and intuitive features.