Restaurant loyalty program ideas that fit how your regulars eat

Start with the regular you see most

Most restaurants have more than one kind of regular. There is the person who has lunch at the same table on weekdays, the couple who come for dinner on the first Friday of the month, the pickup order at six, and the group that books a table for a birthday. They come back at different speeds and spend different amounts, so one reward will not suit all of them.

Pick the pattern you see most in your own sales and reward that one first. Every idea below uses a reward Droom’s program offers: points for visits, dollars off once someone spends a set amount, a birthday discount texted on the day, holiday offers and win-back texts. The steps for getting it onto the counter are in our guide to setting up a loyalty program, and if you are still deciding whether texts suit your restaurant at all, start with whether text-message loyalty programs work.

Reward ideas, one regular at a time

The weekday lunch regular

Someone who eats with you two or three times a week gets through a visit count fast, so points for visits suit them. Each visit earns a point, and the points add up to a reward you choose. Set the count so they reach it within weeks. As an example, ten lunches for a free one takes a little over a month for someone who comes in every Tuesday and Thursday. The reward could be the lunch itself, or a coffee or dessert with it, which costs you less (more on that below).

The dinner table

A couple or a family who come for dinner once a month spend more each time but visit far less often, and a ten-visit count would take them most of a year. Dollars off after a set spend fits them better, because every large bill moves them a long way. Droom’s loyalty page uses $10 off after $100 as its example, and you set both numbers. For a table that spends about $90 a visit (an example figure), they pass $100 on their second dinner.

The takeout order

A regular who orders the same thing every Thursday and picks it up at the counter can be treated like the lunch regular: a point for each pickup, and a reward after a set number. Put the QR stand where people wait for their order, since that is where they have their phone out. Whether orders placed online or through a delivery service count toward the reward depends on what the program connects to at your till, and that is a question for a call with Joe.

The birthday

The program texts a birthday discount to each member on the day. A birthday is already a reason to eat out, and the text puts your name in front of them on the day they are choosing where to go. Keep the offer easy to use on the night: a dessert, or a set amount off their meal. If they bring friends, the friends pay as usual.

The regular who has gone quiet

Win-back texts go out on their own to someone who has not been in for a while. You will not always know why a regular stopped coming, and the text does not need to ask. It needs a reason to come back that is worth the trip. This one is an illustration written for this guide, not a message from any real program:

[Your restaurant]: We have not seen you in a while. Your next lunch comes with a free coffee. Reply STOP to stop these texts.

The slow night

If one night of your week is always quiet, you can aim an offer at it. Droom’s program lets you send an offer when you choose, and win-back texts can be timed for your slow days. An example: a text to members on Monday afternoon offering a free dessert with dinner that evening. How many people it brings in is something only your own count will tell you, so send it, count the members who come in to use it, and decide from that whether to send it again.

Rewards that cost less than they look

A discount on the bill costs you its face value: $10 off is $10 less in the till. An item from your menu costs you what it takes to make, while your customer values it at the menu price.

Here is an illustration with made-up numbers; use your own. Say a dessert sells for $9 and costs you $3 to make. Give it as a reward and your customer gets something they would have paid $9 for, while you have given up $3 of ingredients and a little of the kitchen’s time. Taking $9 off their bill instead would cost you the full $9.

The items that work best are ones the kitchen already makes in volume and can add to an order without slowing the line: a coffee, a side, a dessert. A reward that needs its own prep slows the kitchen on whichever night people choose to redeem it, and that may be your busiest.

What to avoid

A reward that takes a year to reach

If your regulars come monthly, a twelve-visit card is a year away, and people stop counting long before that. Work back from how often your regular actually comes in, and set the reward so they reach it in weeks.

Rules your staff cannot explain at the till

Whoever is serving should be able to explain the program in one sentence while a customer pays. “Ten lunches and the next one is free” fits. A rule like double points on weekdays except holidays, with a spend minimum on Fridays, does not, and a customer who cannot follow it will not join. Canada’s federal guidance on texting customers, covered under the next heading, also asks businesses to train every employee in their texting practices, so the person at the till should know what members have agreed to and what happens when someone replies STOP.

Texting people who did not sign up

Promotional texts count as commercial electronic messages under Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation, known as CASL. The government’s guide to texting for good client relations says you need consent before you send them, that your business name belongs in the text, and that a customer who replies STOP must be respected. In Droom’s program customers agree to texts when they sign up, and every text lets them opt out. Phone numbers from your reservation book did not join your program, so leave them out of it.

The same page advises texting sparingly and watching how many people unsubscribe, since a high number can mean customers read your texts as spam. Texts with a reason behind them, such as a birthday, a win-back or the occasional quiet-night offer, are easier to keep sparing than a text that goes out every week whether or not there is anything new in it. This is a plain summary rather than legal advice.

What it costs to run one

Droom’s loyalty program is $249 a month, with no setup fee and no contract. It runs month to month, and it is its own product, separate from the $449 automation plan and from a website build. The card your customers see carries your restaurant’s name, not Droom’s.

To see whether it would pay, divide $249 by what a customer spends on an average visit and round up. That is how many extra visits a month it has to bring back. Two examples with made-up spends: at an $18 lunch, 249 divided by 18 is 13.8, so 14 extra lunches a month cover $249. At a $90 dinner table, 249 divided by 90 is 2.8, so three extra dinners do it. Count the win-backs, the birthday visits and the rewards people come in to redeem, not the regulars who would have come anyway. The sum counts sales rather than profit, so hold it against your own margin. The calculator on the loyalty program page works it out for your spend.

If you hand out paper stamp cards now, how a punch card compares with text-message loyalty puts the two side by side. If you run a café and your website needs work too, our page on websites for cafés shows what we build, and a new website is a one-time build from $999, priced separately.

The next step

Pick the regular you see most, then put your average spend into the calculator on the loyalty program page. If the number of visits looks reachable, ring 778-504-7535 or book a short call with Joe to go through which reward fits your restaurant and how it would run at your counter.