Loyalty Card for Restaurants: Bringing Customers Back

Filling your restaurant with new customers can be costly: advertising, visibility on portals, welcome discounts. Bringing back customers who have already been to your restaurant and had a good experience costs much less, and in the restaurant industry, it's the regular customers who pay the bills at the end of the month. The loyalty card is designed to do just that: give customers a concrete reason to choose you again instead of the new restaurant down the street.

Why the traditional stamp card is no longer enough

The classic stamp card has three known flaws: the customer loses it or leaves it at home, the stamps can be cheated, and you don't learn anything - you don't know who the customer is, how often they come, or what they order. The digital version solves all three problems: the card lives on the customer's phone, points are tracked, and you finally see who your loyal customers are.

How to set up rewards

• Achievable: the first reward should be reached within a few visits. A goal of twenty dinners doesn't motivate anyone.
• High perceived value and low cost: a complimentary dessert, a welcome drink, or a house liqueur: they cost you little and please the customer.
• Easy to explain: one line: every tenth lunch is free. If the mechanism requires a rulebook, it's wrong.
• Consistent with your restaurant: the pizzeria rewards the tenth pizza, the bar rewards breakfast, and the restaurant can reward customers who bring friends.

Common mistakes

1. Stingy rewards: a 5% discount after ten dinners conveys the opposite of generosity.
2. Launch and forget: if the staff doesn't promote it, the program dies within a month.
3. No expiration or novelty: a program that remains the same for three years stops being a reason to return.

Then there's the mistake of not measuring: launching the card and never looking at the numbers. Activations per week, returning customers, redeemed rewards: three metrics that in a month say whether the program is working or needs to be adjusted.

How to get started in practice

With Ordinami, the loyalty card is included in the PRO plan, integrated into the digital menu: the customer activates it from the same QR code they use to browse the menu, without needing to download an app or print cards. You can find the plan details on the pricing page. The launch is just as important as the tool: prepare a phrase for the staff ("with our card, the tenth lunch is free, activate it from the QR code in ten seconds"), a reminder, and offer it with every check for the first two weeks. Then look at the numbers: how many activated it and how many returned. If you want to see how it works from the customer's side, open a test account and test it on your phone before launching it in your restaurant. After the first month, the push can decrease: at that point, the program promotes itself with every menu scan.