Restaurants: Your Inactive Customers are Highly Valuable ‚Here's Why and How to Reactivate Them.

The numbers are in: it is far cheaper to get a customer to order again than it is to acquire a wholly new customers to 4.8x more cost-effective, in fact (Aberdeen Group research).

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With your ChatFood ordering system, you get access to valuable (and private) customer feedback and ratings. You may notice that you receive a lot of 4 and 5 star ratings, which is great! However,  at some point, these same satisfied customers may stop re-ordering.

Reactivating dormant customer that hasn't ordered in a while is something that every restaurant owner needs to be doing, but this comes with its own set of challenges and operational hurdles. Let's walk through why you should be thinking about your reactivation strategy, and then how ChatFood helps you to keep customers coming back.

Why do happy customers stop ordering?

Today's foodies are spoiled for choice. There are over 9,000 restaurants in the UAE alone, and Dubai has one of the highest restaurant-per-person ratios in the world (around 260/restaurant). Your customers are spoiled for choice, and may often need to be reminded about the great experiences they've had with your food. An email reactivation campaign may be the push they need to re-engage with your brand.

What is a re-activation campaign?

A reactivation campaign is a piece of communication aiming to incentivize orders from your ‚dormant‚ clientele, defined by inactivity after a certain period of time. The most effective reactivation campaigns

1. Communicate to the customer that they are important to you
2. Reach the customer at at opportune time
3. Are often paired with a discount or extra incentive to re-engage

Why is it cheaper than acquiring new customers?

Think about your acquisition channels, or how you gain new customers.

• Direct marketing across social media

If you use ChatFood's advanced marketing tools to advertise across Facebook, Instagram, and Google, you are aware of your cost-per-purchase to new audiences. This figure is what it costs you to get a customer to order for the first time. And although ChatFood's marketing services are affordable and effective, this number is going to be many times higher than the costs associated with our free reactivation emails.

• Your listing on a food aggregator platform

Here, you pay up to 35% on every single order, plus the cost of aggressive discounts required by the algorithm to be listed prominently on these platforms, as well as the delivery charges involved. Once a customer has already discovered your food, and had a great experience, there should be no reason to continue paying this high cost to get a repeat order from them.

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How do you start a reactivation campaign?

At ChatFood, we understand the value of your customer loyalty, as well as the myriad of operational problems restaurant owners need to consider. That's why we launched automatic email reactivation reminders, now available for our 4000+ restaurants.

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Here's what is great about it:

1. It's automatic, simplifying your marketing operations

Your reactivation email is sent automatically when a customer has been dormant for a certain period of time (14, 21, or 30 days) variable that you're in control of. Try out all three to see which yields the best results for your brand. Since it's automatic, this is one less thing for you to think about simply set your parameters, and watch the re-orders come in.

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2. Reach your customers when they're most likely to convert

Beyond choosing the dormancy period, you can choose whether your customer receives the email in the morning, or in the afternoon. This is crucial. If your food is most popular for dinner, sending in the afternoon just as the hunger pangs kick in is going to make far more sense, and be more effective, than if your food is best served at lunch-time (when a morning email would be best).

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3. Attach a discount to win back the customer

Your customer is slipping away here, there is a feature that automatically creates a new discount just for the recipients of this email. This makes the customer feel valued, and is just the push they need to re-engage.

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4. It's branded, and customizable

ChatFood steps out of the way, and lets you own your customer relationships. Although we have some recommended defaults ready, here's how the email fits your branding, and what you can edit:

• Your logo appears prominently at the top of the email
• Choose a subject line that fits your tone-of-voice, and grabs attention
• Choose a headline that shows your customer that you value them
• Write your own message copy that aligns with the offer you're promoting
• Give your offer a headline to drive the point home
• Adjust the button text to make sure you get that click

The customization potential here is endless, so try and test a number of different angles to achieve the highest conversion rate. Maybe you choose to promote a new item, or maybe you're simply reminding them of your most-popular classics you're in control here.

Ready to get started?

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Click the button below to get access to automatic re-activation campaigns, as well as a world class ordering system and restaurant marketing services.

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