How Personalized Mobile Marketing Creates Loyalists out of Fast Casual Restaurant Customers

Imagine it’s nearly lunchtime. You’ve been in and out of meetings all day and haven’t had any time for breakfast or even a snack between Zoom calls. You get that feeling in the pit of your stomach that says, “if I don’t get food in the next 20 minutes, I might scream.” What do you do?

If you’re like most people, you reach for the device that’s with you all the time: your phone. You remembered an email about a deal from your favorite fast food lunch spot down the road from your apartment, but there’s no time to search for the details. So you open the restaurant’s mobile app, hoping to find the offer personalized to your favorite lunch order, the #6 with no tomatoes and tater tots instead of fries. 

But it’s not there! Now you’re in the app with no time to check your email because you’re ordering between work assignments, and you only have 15 minutes to decide on food, hop in the car, pick up lunch, and scarf it down before your weekly meeting with your boss. 

Not the greatest customer experience, is it? 

Mobile Marketing Creates Convenience for Food Service Customers

Ordering food is a snap decision, one that’s often made in the moment and done so in the most convenient way possible. While email personalization is a powerful way to maintain relationships with your customers when their bellies are full, if you’re not creating the same experience on your mobile app, then that convenience can be lost. Plus, with the influx of digital technologies that have penetrated the food services industry since March 2020, another restaurant may swoop in to steal that order.

The average American spends four hours and 20 minutes on their phone a day, largely within the apps they most often use–social media, dating, banking, and other apps that make life more effortless. What’s easier, checking your credit card balance on your phone or calling your bank for an update? Every time you want to check Instagram or Twitter, do you run to the nearest laptop or just open your phone to see what your friends are talking about today?

The stickiest apps for consumers aren’t just ones that are necessary to their daily lives, they cut out the endless steps it requires to make quick decisions. And when you’re hungry, you’re likely to order food on the restaurant app that knows your regular order, can help you cut the line at the store, and can even display your loyalty points and how many more orders until your next free coffee or order of fries. 

Personalization Starts with the Right Martech Stack

More than 70% of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations, and 62% expect you to adapt to their desires. To do so, you need technology that takes the data you have on customers and creates brilliantly visual personalized notifications, in-app messages, and even SMS messages. 

Why brilliantly visual? Well, 61% of food services consumers order takeout on their phone, but they’re also inundated with more and more messages from restaurants that have invested heavily in digital experiences since the pandemic slowed their traditional dining room experiences. Even if many of your customers want to order via an app, they’re receiving so many bland notifications that only the most optimized will stand out. Unless you personalize that touchpoint, yours could be ignored at best or a cause for turning off notifications at worst. 

Take the below example.

Inkredible Eatery created a notification customized to several customer data points in order to encourage Kevin to order a cup of coffee and possibly a breakfast sandwich. Marketers pulled the weather in Seattle, where Kevin is currently located, and matched the chilly temperature with a warm cup of coffee. Conversely, if he were in Phoenix or Houston on a steaming summer day, marketers could substitute an image of a cold brew for a warm weather experience.

The goal of the notification is not only to personalize Kevin’s coffee order, but to increase his order amount. To do that, the notification displays Kevin’s current loyalty status along with a tracker that shows how close he is to graduating to the next status tier. This small gamification tactic could change a takeout coffee to a full breakfast order so he can discover what rewards await him, like the exclusive Diamond status. 

Notifications like the one above place Kevin in the center of the message, not Inkredible Eatery. Marketers will need to focus on customer-centricity and strategy data personalization to compete for Kevin’s attention and keep him loyal to the brand, especially since competing restaurants are doing the same thing.

Make it Easy. Make it Consistent.

According to PYMNT, consumers use four channels on average to order food. Every person that grabs takeout or a cup of coffee from your restaurant expects the same ordering experience no matter which channel they’re using. So if your email messages are personalized, but your app experience or SMS isn’t, they will take notice. 

In February 2022 alone, there was a 13% increase in the number of fast casual restaurant apps downloaded by consumers month over month. Mobile personalization and human-centric marketing tactics are no longer “nice to have.” Customers expect them. 

Personalization isn’t all about making the customer happy. It’s about optimizing your digital marketing ROI and increasing every customer’s average lifetime value. Paytrix found that the purchase frequency of digital guests is 50% greater than non-digital guests. 

The restaurant mogul Danny Meyer, CEO of the Union Square Hospitality Group once said that “hospitality is present when something happens for you. It’s absent when something happens to you. Those two simple prepositions–for and to–say it all.”

With that being said, now is the time to create mobile experiences that keep your customers coming back for more.