Loyalty Program: A Key to Making Your Mobile App Ordering System Successful

Market conditions are volatile and the situation only seems to get more erratic considering the pace at which things are changing. It is true that restaurant businesses must try and increase their customer base but as many business owners would vouch for the idea of holding on and maintaining the existing customer base with an increased fervor. It is an economical truth and works to the advantage of the business, manifold. With increased competition in almost all sectors of business, it wouldn’t be wrong to point out that every business faces a great amount threat due to the law of substitution that now seems to be at its peak.

Customers these days have a lot of options to choose from when it comes to different cuisines and types of restaurant spaces and with such a wide range of options comes to the power of making a choice. The challenge now is the task of standing apart and making our very own identity among the masses and making sure that there isn’t any deletion in our customers.

With increased power, customers these days have the ability to ignore the products they seem unfit to their need. They may also send across negative reviews about your restaurant business and this can be detrimental to the overall reputation that belongs to the organization. A corporate disaster management is what business owners must resort to in order to service, satiate and retain existing customers and a tried and tested method is a loyalty program.

With more and more businesses operating business via mobile app ordering system, a loyalty program can actually help the virtual business flourish with just a few taps on the screen. Loyalty programs for mobile food ordering app were once upon a time considered nothing but a marketing gimmick which definitely was and is the truth. It continues to be a part of every company’s innate marketing tool. In the recent past, this role has received a bit of a facelift with mobile apps including loyalty programs into its regiment of functionalities. Loyalty programs that didn’t really achieve the kind of success it deserved have slowly started noticing its silver lining post the birth of mobile apps.

Planned, drafted and created, keeping in mind the pros and cons of the program and its potential effect on the customer’s, loyalty app programs are truly game changers in the customer-business relationship. If planned well, it can help retain old customers as well as provide a strong reason for such customers to indirectly lure the new ones into your expanding customer base. The fact lies in revolutionizing the customer-business equation with a loyalty program via a mobile app and here’s the step-by-step recipe to a perfect loyalty program mobile app partnership:

1. Set goals and identify your target in depth: Every business owner has a lot many ideas behind the development of an app. Getting a clear perspective of the future is an essential part of the game. Most loyalty app programs for food ordering system have gone kaput because of the unclear goal specification and planning. In order to design a loyalty program that you hope will become a runaway success, you have to understand your target audience and create a blend of customer’s expectations as well as your very own. The understanding must be the demographics, their preferences, the trends they follow, the motive behind their shopping expeditions and their knowledge of the competitor. Make use of every source of investigation to get the authentic information.

2. The Competitor Watch: Make sure you know your competitor well before embarking on a new project. The smartest competitor is the one who knows a lot more about his competitor more than the competitor himself. Take a detailed look at all the programs and reward plans made by them in the past. Check the reviews it garnered and the customer’s sentiments. This will help you set targets and standards to go beyond what already exists.

3. Formulate a novelty: Once you know every possible detail about your customer’s taste preferences and that of the competitor’s business tactics, plan a reward program that can utilize every possible functionality available on your mobile app. Exploit the hidden potential of your app. Out of the box ideas combined with a detailed feasibility, a check can help you. Conduct an in-depth analysis of the various loyalty program you have created in the past. Check for all the possible flaws that may have been associated with the plan and also examine the programs created by competitors. Now create a mix of the corrected flaws as well as you’re out of the box creative to give the loyalty program a revamp.

4. Referrals: A research conducted back in 2012 by a group of researchers based in Mumbai found that referral programs account for the lowest flops in marketing. They account for about 60 to 65 percent of the marketing success. Create an interesting referral program to lure your existing base to connect with a new set of potential targets. With a referral program, you are actually making your loyal customers do a bit of the marketing job for you. Include a plan like, 5 loyalty app installations from the existing customer’s referral end will win them a day at the resort or a complimentary dinner. Referrals have witnessed the lowest failure rate.

5. Publicize your brain app: What good is the product of some high-end intellectual analysis if nobody, especially your target doesn’t get to know about it? Publicizing the program is a bit more important that all other stages that precede it. Most successful restaurant businesses swear by the power of right publicity and that it may be easier to sell a bad program with an amazing publicity stunt but equally difficult to sell an incredible program without good publicity. Businesses must do everything possible to remain visible in front of the customers. With so many organizations and products that are similar, it becomes difficult to maintain one’s identity intact and in most cases, it is an out of sight, out of mind incident. Hence, pay a lot of focus on publicizing the loyalty app.

6. Keep in touch: Your responsibility doesn’t really end with just introducing the app. Your work, in fact, starts after employing a loyalty app. It is necessary for you to connect with your customers on a regular basis in order to collect quality feedback to work on the flaws and better the app or loyalty program. This itself is the beginning of a deep customer- business relationship and business owners must pay a lot of emphasis on bettering it.

7. Keep it simple and real: Do not expect your loyalty app to bring your overnight success. Accomplishing goals are in fact a slow and quality driven process that demands a lot of time and patience. Keep your goals simple and realistic for your loyalty program and business app to accomplish.

Loyalty apps have proved themselves, many times in the past. Yet, there seem to be a lot that these apps are capable of accomplishing. Creating a perfect loyalty app and driving the program well demands a vision and a full proof plan. Make sure that you pay focus on the quality of the loyalty app in order to maintain the existing base, who after being satiated may help you acquire a new base.