How long should you wait for customers to walk into your restaurant and spend money?

Let me rephrase that, how long should you expect to wait for someone on your restaurants email list to FINALLY become a customer.

In episode 592 of my podcast, Restaurant Marketing Secrets, I talked about this exact topic and how a restaurant owner who joined our email list 12 months prior FINALLY became a customer of ours.  As a business owner it’s hard to wait that long right?  I know I’m not the only one thinking this, because every week the past 16 years clients of ours have asked “when are these customers coming in?”  For some crazy reason we all think that just because someone raises their hand, that they are no coming to buy what we are selling. 

This is what leads us all to fail in marketing.  It causes us to give up too soon.  And in many cases those changes to our marketing plan are why our sales never grow. 

The image above is what we call a “marketing funnel”.  It’s the journey your customers takes when they come in contact with your brand.  Most restaurant owners don’t have these funnels built like they should and they commonly under FUEL the funnel, meaning they don’t put enough people in each funnel to see success.  

By the way, we have a free training on restaurant funnels, CLICK HERE to join that ABR U module for free. There are 7 In Depth Restaurant Marketing Funnels in this training that explain exactly what I’m talking about and give you step by step instructions on:

– Restaurant Birthday Funnel

– Restaurant Loyalty Funnel

– Restaurant Marketing Funnel

– Restaurant New Customer Acquisition Funnel

– Restaurant Catering Funnel

BUT now back to my example.   Let’s say you’re building a Loyalty program.  The bottom of your funnel is someone joining your restaurants loyalty program.  But the top is the traffic.  The 3 places you can get traffic for your funnel are in-store, your website and through social media.  

The lack of traffic to your loyalty funnel is why loyalty programs don’t grow how they should. Here’s what happens.  You launch a loyalty program and your team is behind it 100% for about 45 to 60 days.  Then after that it slowly dies and loses all in-store momentum.  So a program that could have tens of thousands of members ends up with maybe 1,000.  

What you’re missing is traffic.  Loyalty is one of the toughest funnels because it’s too specific.  The only people that are going to join your Loyalty program are hard core customers.   So if you do not have another program feeding it, then it’s dead in the water.  Our best tactic for this is a VIP program.  We run marketing campaigns everywhere I mentioned above.  But we focus mainly on a source we can control, paid Facebook and Instagram ads.  We offer customers an offer so good they’d feel stupid saying no to in exchange for their contact information.  Now those customers are in our “restaurant new customer acquisition funnel.”  Once they are in that funnel we use the emails, texts and retargeting ads to drive that first visit through the VIP program.  And once they’ve visited NOW they are traffic for the restaurants loyalty program.  

From that point on it’s the funnel below.  The customers now like us, so it’s time to get them to like and trust us.  Then and only then will they convert to the loyalty program.  

And what we all need to keep in mind is that this process could take a month or 3 years.  The longer you keep your funnels in place the better,  and like I mentioned in the podcast I was reminded of this last week. 

See ya tomorrow,

Matt