Do you know the advantages of offering gift cards and electronic purses in your restaurant? Mother's Day is approaching and 90% of mothers want to eat with their family, of course without cooking. In the following article we will tell you why gift cards are the perfect gift.

How do you use a gift card in a restaurant?

The use of Gift card or gift card in your restaurant is possible thanks to a small magnetic reader and a point of sale system (in the case of Soft Restaurant® with the module RestCard®), each card has a unique code for each customer, who can use them as a means of payment, to obtain points or to receive discounts at your restaurant.

Additionally a rewards system helps create loyalty among your diners and increase the frequency of purchase. Let's see the following benefits:

Get to know your guests

One of the advantages is the possibility of studying a specific group of customers and knowing their names, ages, gender and other data that are very important for the strategies that you create for your restaurant, such as average visits, favorite dishes, average consumption , among others.

This data will be useful to offer better customer service, offer the really attractive products and services, and build lasting relationships with satisfied customers.

Interact with other businesses

All the giveaway promotions They are beneficial for businesses that share a square or are in a commercial area with great affluence, choose a type of strategy that includes products from different businesses for a special event or celebration.

You can offer gift cards that include a bouquet of flowers, jewelry and a 3-course dinner at your restaurant, making the offer more attractive and reaching different types of potential customers.   

Build customer loyalty in your restaurant

A loyalty strategy helps to attract customers and increase the frequency of consumption of the regular customer, to achieve this you need to offer value that differentiates you from other gastronomic proposals.

Create an ideal customer profile and work on promotions that may interest them, to become the ideal bar to go after the office, the restaurant for family dinner or the cafeteria for doing business. Once your value proposition is identified, we need to identify what type of fidelazation program you want to incorporate

Among the best promotions to retain customers, 35% want to earn points for the amount of money they consume and 26% want to receive discounts on their consumption, analyze which promotion suits your restaurant's strategy and formulate favorable conditions to make these valid discounts, either to promote new products, generate demand on days with little influx or increase the average ticket of visits.

Measure the success of your promotions

Loyalty programs are essential to obtain your KPI (key performance indicator), this acronym is an indicator to measure performance and in this case it will measure the success of your promotions.

Sometimes it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of a campaign through social networks, with a gift card system you can set the objectives to be measured and it will be easier to track your campaigns by measuring the response of your guests.

Implement marketing strategies

The advantage of having data such as telephones, emails and birthday dates is to be able to create exclusive promotions for your clients or send reminders of your events and discounts of the month, take advantage of it to create digital strategies that are more direct.

Free tools like MailChimp allows you to manage up to 2000 emails for free to send digital campaigns or to remember the birthday party of the month promotions.

Attract new customers to your business

As a business owner or manager you need to create strategies that attract new diners very frequently, with a recommendation strategy you can offer gift cards so that your current clients can give a friend a coffee, they can get a second free combo or a 50 % off.

The snowball effect will help expand your promotions among the circles of friends of your customers, we suggest you reinforce your strategy of content marketing on social media to spread and transmit the value offer that your restaurant has.

Security and better administration

Depending on the type of customers and the area of ​​your business, gift cards can be a secure means of payment for your guests, since they can see the immediate benefit of having a better management of their expenses and avoiding the use of cash .

As a business owner you can recharge the card balance, cancel in case of theft or transfer the amounts to a new card, offering greater control and security for your customers who are looking for an alternative of this type to offer a new secure payment method for they.

Why should I have a Gift Card system in my business?

Whether you are looking to attract your ideal customer, increase your income or formulate new ideas for marketing strategies, gift card systems like RestCard are mechanisms that increase customer loyalty by making their visits more frequent in your restaurant. 

Get to know RestCard®, the Soft Restaurant® loyalty module with which your customers can use their card at any of your branches and receive the benefits while obtaining all the information on their visits in a centralized manner.