Three tips to future proof your QSR business through customer engagement

In a fiercely competitive market, customer engagement has always been a huge differentiator for quick-service restaurants (QSRs).

As we come out of the Omicron wave and consumers return to eating out, now is a critical time to strengthen your customer relationships to ensure that your brand remains top of mind. And this means delivering consistently compelling customer experiences through personalised, engaging campaigns that add long-term value.

Yet many QSRs face a complex set of challenges in understanding and improving their customer journey. For example, how do you deliver a tailored experience to each customer, measure the impact of engagement campaigns on your digital and physical operations, and maximise engagement through loyalty programmes?

Here are three customer engagement strategies to help you gain and retain customers whilst boosting loyalty and spend:
 
1. Boost order sizes
Customers typically buy the most basic – and least expensive – versions of products, shying away from add-ons and premium options.

Targeting them with ‘in-product’ messages (within your app or website) based on their previous order history and favourite meals is a good way to highlight relevant extras before they check out.

Similarly, ‘out-of-product’ messages – such as emails containing deep links – can be used to showcase your premium offerings, making them easier to purchase.

The outcome should result in higher order sizes, leading to greater purchases per order.

2. Retrieve abandoned carts
How can you reduce the number of customers abandoning meal checkout and failing to complete transactions? Being able to automatically recapture potential purchases beyond the browsing stage results in higher sales with minimal effort.

Use channels such as web push and mobile push to remind consumers about their pending order. Also, it could be a great opportunity for brands to let their users know if their order has gone down in price, adding value to the customer.

Leverage intelligent timings to send the messages to the users when they are highly likely to engage and nudge recipients to come back and complete their order.

According to Braze data, these are 53% more likely to drive cart conversions than email and 23% more effective than mobile notifications at getting people to return to sites and complete pending orders.
 
3. Build loyalty
In today’s multi-channel environment, customers have unique preferences for the channels they use when making purchases and how they hear from you. Your loyalty-program communications should reflect these choices while personalising each message you send.

Tailoring your cross-channel communications will create valuable experiences for customers. That will boost your loyalty and reward programs enrollment, motivate customers to engage with them more often, and encourage higher spend.

When looking to improve its loyalty programme, Australian café chain The Coffee Club integrated its customer journey onto the Braze platform. Content Cards allowed them to send customers the right offers, through the proper channels, at the right time. The result was a 35% uplift in loyalty-driven sales and a 62% rise in conversions for their paid VIP programme.

Taking all of this into account, your ability to implement these strategies will depend partly on your tech stack. Fully optimising and personalising your customer communications requires the right collection of technology, specifically systems that can talk to each other to create brilliant customer experiences.

Consumers expect seamless connected customer experiences from the brands they engage with. As a brand, you need to listen to your customers, understand their behaviour and preferences, and then act to create that compelling, human experience. 

This will lead to retaining your customers longer, increasing your purchase per user, and building lifetime value with them.