One of the greatest challenges for cafes is to get people to walk through your doors and make a first-time purchase. In an ever-competitive field however, cafes that do not put customer retention plans in place are the ones most likely to fail.
Far too many cafes figure that their food and drink will do all the talking. These same cafes believe that they do not need to re-market to customers who have already experienced their product, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Here we explore customer retention for cafes, and the importance of making sure first-time customers become long-term relationships.
Obtaining details for customer retention
In order to have any chance of retaining a customer you need to ensure that you get them to agree that you can contact them in the future. Otherwise, all you are really doing is cold calling, and probably breaking privacy laws at the same time.
To do this explore implementing comment cards or promotions whereby the diner has to give you their email (and tick or cross a box for marketing) to enter their thoughts about your company or a competition.
This way, you keep everything legal and at the same time build a platform for existing customer marketing.
Maintain outstanding customer service at all times
This hopefully won’t come as a big surprise. The best way to make sure people want to come back to your cafe is by offering great customer service (as well as great product of course).
A huge 86% of people will never use a company again if they feel they’ve received average or poor customer service.
Making sure your staff members understand the importance of being well versed, polite and helpful can go a long way toward to strong customer retention.
Why is it important to retain customers?
Most expert marketers argue that customer retention offers more benefits than marketing to new customers.
There is no denying that it is way more cost-effective to retain an existing customer than to find a new one.
In fact, a study performed recently showed that it costs seven times (!) the amount to find a new customer than it does to retain one.