The Recipe for Restaurant Loyalty Program Success? Making Every Customer Feel Like a Regular

When I walk into Meister’s Bar in Columbus, Ohio, and I’m handed my favorite cold beverage, something special happens. It’s something more valuable than the drink itself. Or its price. (Even if it’s happy hour.)

It’s one of life’s greatest sensations: walking into a restaurant or bar and being greeted with your first name, a question about your day, and “the usual.” That can be a feeling you have to fight for — a feeling you earn after weeks, months, maybe years of patronage, the product of countless interactions. But, it’s a feeling that suddenly transforms a place — a business that could otherwise feel like any old stop, on any old day, becomes something more than transactional.

Nowhere in this “regular” experience is a punch card. Or an incentivized system where customers earn points, perks, or discounts. Or a quantified view of how loyal you are as a customer. Or how close you are to becoming that regular. (Sure, there may be a free appetizer or drink here and there, but menu items aren't really the point here.)

Connection is built out of earned, human relationships — not coupons. Such is the gold standard for what a quick service restaurant's customer loyalty program should be.

Appealing to Emotion and Experience in Restaurant Loyalty Programs

It’s what your favorite dive does right.

Too often, I see quick service restaurant (QSR) brands using the word “loyalty” to describe a “complex system of volume-based discounts” or a “convenient coupon delivery mechanism” for their customer base. During this time of inflation, constricted family budgets, and intense competition, deals and promotions play an important role in engaging repeat and new customers. McDonald’s, for example, is turning back to value offers after seeing same-store sales drop for the first time since 2020. It’s just one example of the enduring need to nail the right mix of promotions, discounts, points-based reward programs, and overall benefits.

But restaurant loyalty programs shouldn’t end there. Doing so stops short of creating a fully integrated loyalty program that translates into visits, transactions, and repeat business with no “coupon carrot” attached.

Thankfully, the tools exist to recreate that feeling of visiting your favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurant down the street (well, perhaps not entirely replicate the experience, but stay with me…). As with all things digital and customer experience, it starts with data. Thanks to the frequent purchase cycles inherent to QSR (more than one-third of all Americans eat fast food daily), the issue is rarely a lack of data. Rather, it’s an abundance of data, collected through countless channels, stored in sometimes countless, siloed systems.

It’s tempting to slip into “tech speak” when talking about these data points, referring to them as abstract pieces of information rather than the personal insights they represent. Every interaction, every purchase, every customer service call, every delightful experience: each represents a very human and tangible glimpse into a single person’s life.

Activating Personalization in Your Restaurant Loyalty Program

Look at your most loyal customers.

Back to my neighborhood bar. The best bartenders and servers can take one look at my face and know just how stressful my day has been. That stuff matters. QSR digital channels should be observing similar customer behaviors, and translate these moments into a more intimate view of who someone is, how they’re doing, and what they need.

Framed that way, it should come as no surprise that connecting every bit of available information about a customer — through a Customer Data Platform or another integration of MarTech platforms — is the foundational step to building loyalty.

But overhearing a conversation in a crowded bar and doing nothing about it doesn’t create loyalty. The same can be said for digital experiences: there’s no value in collecting transactional and behavioral data and neglecting to act upon it. Once stitched together and made available for use, the aim of any effective loyalty program should be the intricately, “humanly,” insightfully architected delivery of personalization. Not personalization as a technical capability, but rather, personalization as “personal” — tailored to a human being’s needs, habits, and known patterns. Treat customers like you know them. Because you do.

Of course, the right promo, discount, or reward redemption at the right moment can feel personal. So can remembering a favorite order, using a personal greeting, sending a proactive notification that a previously purchased limited-time offer (LTO) is coming back, or remembering how long it’s been since a customer last visited your restaurant.

There are countless ways to activate personalization in rewards programs. Data, systems, processes, and compelling examples all exist today to bring every conceived moment to life through any number of digital channels.

Ensuring Your Customers Feel Like Regulars

It’s a tall order. WillowTree can help.

There is a finesse to personalization and getting that “wow” sensation just right. The data must be accurate, the insights must be sound, the experience must feel bespoke, and the delivery must feel organic. Every link in the chain must do its job to deliver the proactive, unexpected, delightful personalization customers are frankly not used to receiving from a “big” company.

Let’s go back to data, insights, experience, and delivery. In these areas alone, almost every piece of a brand’s technical ecosystem is impacted — from CDP to mobile app, to email modular design kit, to customer engagement platform, and everything in between. Nailing the orchestration of all those tools to build a beautiful personalization machine is daunting and sometimes time-consuming. But 100 percent of the time, it’s always the absolute right thing to do.

Every brand and every loyalty program sits at some stage of the journey between “let’s just give them points they can redeem” vs. “let’s build a truly human relationship.” At WillowTree, we’re lucky to work with some of the world’s biggest QSR brands to help do the difficult but mission-critical work of building truly personalized loyalty programs that treat customers like the unique humans they are.

The secret to staying the course and perfecting the personalization chain — all the way from data to customer digital experience — is framing the challenge as the very human aspiration it represents. Every customer deserves to feel like a “regular.” We as QSR businesses, as loyalty program directors, and as digital marketers, owe it to our customers to do everything in our power to create that fleeting, powerful, deeply personal feeling of connection.

From mobile apps and MarTech stacks to the tools used by frontline employees, WillowTree helps our partners earn customer loyalty across every stage of the journey.

Let’s talk about how we can be of service to your brand.