What Brings a Restaurant Customer Back?

By Becky Johnson, Advertising Week Writer & Podcast Host

Most of us have joined a restaurant loyalty program for a deal. We enter a phone number, collect points, and wait for an offer that makes the next order feel like a bargain. That can bring someone through the door, but it leaves restaurants with a difficult question: what happens when they cannot afford to keep offering the same discount to everyone?

I talked with Diane Le, VP of Marketing, Restaurants at PAR Technology, about that question on Modern Marketing and Measurement. Diane works with restaurant and convenience store brands, and she has seen renewed interest in games and other ways to involve customers between purchases. She is careful to distinguish that from asking people to play a game for its own sake. A restaurant has to give them a reason to open the app or respond to an invitation, then make the next step worthwhile.

Diane gave the example of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s announcing a code drop on social media. People came at a set time, played, and received either a special code or another benefit. The promotion gave them a reason to show up together, and it brought them into the brand’s app. Sports can create a similar opening: a team reaches a score, fans celebrate, and a restaurant offers something tied to that moment. The appeal is easy to understand if you have ever found yourself cheering a little harder because a free Chalupa was on the line.

Timing matters beyond the event itself. Diane advises brands to give a promotion enough room to grow, often by running it across several weekends. People need a chance to hear about it, remember it, and decide to take part. That helps explain why a loyalty program can include a longer seasonal game, smaller challenges in between, and offers tied to a particular day. A customer may only visit a restaurant once a month or even less often; the program has plenty of time between those visits to stay in touch.

Smoothie King’s three-month effort shows the potential and the measurement problem side by side. It generated two million game plays and a 40% increase in loyalty signups. Diane said the new members were spending more than nonmembers, too. But plays and signups alone cannot tell a restaurant everything it wants to know. The harder work is comparing participants with people who did not take part and looking at what happens to their spending and visits over time.

Even that comparison gets messy in a restaurant. Someone can order as a loyalty member on Monday, use DoorDash on Friday, and walk in the following week without giving a phone number. If the restaurant sees only the identified loyalty transactions, it has an incomplete picture of a customer it may know very well. Diane says PAR is working on better ways to account for transactions outside the loyalty program so brands can more accurately understand its impact.

The conversation also turned to what restaurants can do with the information they already have. Diane described how order history can distinguish a guest looking for a family meal from someone interested in a new menu item. She shared an example in which an analysis found that salad buyers were the most likely customers to add a new cookie, a finding the team then tested. She likes what AI can reveal in a large dataset, but she also tells her team to check its conclusions because it can be wrong.

All of this brings the discussion back to a fairly ordinary customer experience: getting an invitation that makes sense, at a time when you might actually use it. For restaurant marketers, the challenge is to create more of those moments without treating every customer alike or calling every app interaction a success. As Diane makes clear in the episode, the measure that matters is what people do after the game is over.