Weaving a loyal web: 3 steps to integrate social into loyalty marketing

By Jessica Williams, marketing manager at Chirpify

It’s been proven that loyalty increases your bottom line. For example, AC Nielson shows that consumers spend 46 percent more with businesses that have loyalty programs. Yet, surprisingly few restaurateurs have loyalty programs, or their customers are not aware of them. So, how can social media be used to increase awareness of your program, get more people to join it, and even create one if you don’t have one yet?

Increase awareness

According to a recent Deloitte survey, 48 percent of respondents said that they have no information about the loyalty programs of the restaurants they visit. And 43 percent said their favorite restaurant did not have a loyalty program at all. Clearly, getting out the word is half the battle and social media is an excellent way to begin spreading the word.  In fact, social is the No. 1 mobile activity and every day diners are checking their social apps on mobile, researching where to eat.

These actions have moved organic brand engagement into the digital landscape and brands need to incorporate them into their loyalty economy. The first step in doing so is to start using social channels as a mechanism to broadcast the existence of your program, promoting the perks that come with it.

One easy way you can get started is to socialize an existing email list by combining social intent with an offer, driving these consumers from email to their social channel of choice. This allows the brand to increase engagement and acquire new loyalists organically while getting a better understanding of which social channels are most popular among customers.

A second way is to create a virtuous cycle where loyalty members are rewarded not just for dining in your restaurant, but for their sharing – amplifying your message and grow reach for you – through their social network(s).

Get people to join

Before this, however, it’s important to get people to join your loyalty program. And, as social media marketing moves beyond vanity metrics and focuses more on conversion actions, getting people to join your loyalty program is the ultimate conversion action to measure when evaluating the success of your social media strategy.  Driving loyalty program sign-ups and ongoing participation offers strategic benefits to growing customer value and engagement. In fact, according to L2Research, 90 percent of loyalty program members desire ongoing communications from the programs in which they participate.   

Social media enlistment of loyalty program members has added benefits. It allows restaurant marketers to link social handles to personally identifiable information such as an email address and membership program number, which then provides marketers a more holistic view of any given customer.  Further, it provides a mechanism for recognizing and rewarding loyal consumers beyond how often they dine in your restaurant. And, allows marketers a mechanism for soliciting feedback on a variety of fronts – from what kind of content diners want to interact with most to new menu items.

Create a social media reward program

If you haven’t already, add social media rewards to your loyalty program, rewarding socially active members for their social actions. Customers appreciate rewards (and a thank you now and again) and respond positively to things like discounts and coupons sent directly to them via email to reward social actions. Geo location rewards such as visiting the restaurant and ‘out of the box’ experiential rewards such as a ‘cut the line pass’ or early tasting of a new signature dish or drink are all very well received and entice customers to not only come back, but tell their friends as well.  Get creative with your rewards and recognitions; your customers will appreciate feeling special and will be sure to share the word.

Social media has a plethora of benefits as it can help you gain important data about your customers – what offers do they respond to most?  Start small and grow the program with your customers in mind, learning which rewards are most apt to ‘surprise and delight’ customers.   These bits of information can inform future decisions to prove and improve your loyalty program moving forward and will start the cycle anew, helping inform net-new customers of your loyalty program, encouraging them to join, and in-turn share with their social networks.

Jessica Williams is Marketing Manager at Chirpify, where she is responsible for driving social strategy and lead generation, in concert digital marketing initiatives. She is a journalism graduate from the University of Oregon.

Photo provided by Flickr user Yoel Ben-Avraham.