How to successfully develop a loyalty app for your restaurant?

Loyalty program is a familiar way in a marketing strategy to attract customers, collect their contact and encourage them to spend more for a service or buy more products. In F&B, loyalty program plays an important role to remind customers to remember and contribute to a brand.

As the born of application, the loyalty program can be introduced by many methods and using a loyalty app can save a lot of cost for any restaurant want to directly connect to their target customers. Let’s check how the app can bring success to a business in the blog today.

Why a loyalty app?

As nowadays, mobile phone is the must-have thing that people bring along when they go outside, installing an application on their phone will be more convenient than using a loyalty card. The application also supports customers in online ordering food and online support to quickly order their meals and increase shoppers’ experience. Furthermore, with the information digitally collected from user application, the business owners can get the exactly report about customers favourite and behaviour to develop a suitable business strategy. With all of these reasons, there are many big brands nowadays own their apps as KFC, McDonald, Starbucks… with the same objectives to encourage customers shopping behaviour. Now let’s take a look to Starbuck case study and see how effective an application can bring to the business.

Launching a mobile application since 2009, the first version of Starbucks mobile application was only applied for some Starbucks branches in the US with the iOS users for payment purposes. The loyalty program wasn’t added on the application until 2016, then according to their report 40% US sales gain from the loyalty program on a mobile application. Continuing this development, the Starbucks application nowadays can not only support online payment but also promoting sales of programs, adding loyalty points programs, online ordering, sending gifts to friends or family, finding nearby Starbucks, tipping baristas, online managing Starbucks card.

Key features for a loyalty app

We all get the idea why the loyalty app plays an important role in the development of a business, now do you know some must-have functions of this kind of application? Before starting to outsource an experienced software development team to create your restaurant application, would you want to find out some interesting features for your app?

Loyalty points

The main purpose of a loyalty app is encouraging loyal members while using a service or buying a product in a restaurant, then this will be the first required function in an application. This function should allow users to earn, track and redeem points, and it should be clear enough so every customer can get how much points they can earn for particular actions.

Online Ordering

As the user of an application nowadays, online ordering can help customers save a lot of time waiting at the lines. By providing the online menu, topping more or removing some ingredients, customers can quickly order and add more flavour as they wish, select the pick-up time and take notes for every order.

Online Payment

Along with the online ordering, online payment can be the easiest way to save time, increase efficiency in F&B business. No need to using the cash, customers can use their application, top-up money online and do a transaction online. However, in this section, you need to ask for a professional software testing team to support as every function related to payment requires a high level of privacy security.

Promotion

To increase the number of users and encourage loyal customers, a promotion program is a familiar campaign for all business owners. By spreading the messages using an application, your campaign will be more successful as target the correct customers, and also save a lot of time and money to reach these customers.

Rating and feedbacks

Rating and feedback or tips to the waitress is an added function which helps customers send their feedback and comments to help the business perfectly develop and satisfy end-users. As it is not the must-have function, it can be a should-have function to enhance users to interact with the application and support our own business.

Finally, to attract and keep customers for your brand, an application is not enough yet, however via an application you can boost end-users to check and make use of an application. Besides, the app can be the very useful tools to analyze customers’ behaviours and can customize an advertising campaign which targets a different type of customers group. Please remember and always remind yourself of what you really want from customers, and what service can you provide customers with the best, so you can plan a successful project from now on.