Gamification for restaurants encapsulates finding various ways to reward consumers and boost sales. For example, you spend ten bucks in a cafe, and that café gives you five redeemable points for those ten bucks so that you can pay them after some time. Alternatively, the restaurant can enroll you in some restaurant loyalty programs. Here are some ways that you, as a restaurant owner, can use gamification to boost your sales.
Benefits of Gamification for Restaurants
• Makes People Loyal
Suppose you live in a city with dozens of coffee shops with similar ambiance and price lists. However, there is one particular restaurant among those that offers different freebies, exceptional loyalty program restaurants, or instant rewards for shopping. Where would you prefer to go? The answer is obvious!
If you know what customer lifetime value is, then you would aptly understand how big an achievement it is to make customers keep coming back to your restaurant. So, gamification techniques help you to ensure consumers keep knocking at your doors.
• Gamification is Pro Spending
By offering loyalty points in exchange for each dollar spent, you encourage individuals to spend more money in your store. The sooner people spend money, the sooner they may use their points to purchase your delectable goodies.
• Bolsters Consumers Engagement
Gamification techniques, especially loyalty programs for restaurants, instill the feeling of winning in customers. Doesn’t it give you a sense of joy even if you beat your friend in a virtual game? Gamification does that! Making those extra pleasant associations with your restaurant can only benefit sales.
Best Ways to Leveraging Gamification Techniques
1. Points Cards
You may give redeemable points for your plant-based eatery in place of stamps. You would need a digital card with the recorded points for this. You can specify that the consumer receives five points for every dollar spent, but five points might only be worth a few cents when redeemed. Consequently, let’s say someone spends $100 at your shop and earns 500 points. Those 500 points can be worth $10 to spend in your shop.
Depending on how your business works, a ratio of 12:1 or 6:1 for spending to reward may be better than 10:1.
 2. Stamp Cards – A Unique Way of Loyalty Program for Restaurants
The classics are unrivaled. There’s a good reason why stamp cards with freebies after six, twelve, or fifteen purchases are so attractive. People are avid collectors! Freebies are quite popular. People enjoy feeling accomplished when they successfully fill out an entire card. Also, it’s a no-brainer that free chocolate brownies simply taste better.
Give consumers a free stamp when they first use their loyalty card to make them feel even more enthusiastic about winning the grand prize. To determine precisely what rewards will make your consumers the happiest, you can think about making a customer empathy map.
3. Instill Urgency
An excellent strategy to encourage consumers to join the rollercoaster before it leaves town is by introducing time-limited offers. By giving deals and points a sensible expiration date, you can immediately persuade people to take advantage of the discounted or free mocktail rather than letting it pass them by. What could be more depressing than a misplaced mocktail? Not at all, no.
Simply choose the appropriate time to make the offer; if it’s too soon after they just ate at your restaurant, that might be pushing it. Some people set aside a certain amount of money each week or month in their minds just for eating out. The urgency component may be lost if the date is set too far in advance.
4. Introduce the Friend Referral Loyalty Program
Offering incentives for recommendations is a successful strategy for growing your client base. Once a friend has purchased $10 or more at the store and has been added to the loyalty card program by a current member, the existing member may receive a free pizza. Therefore, they can casually bring up pizza the next time they talk to their friend.
This approach can be implemented in a variety of ways. Simply ensure there aren’t any simple-to-exploit flaws that would allow someone to sign up, get a free pizza, and never pay a penny.
5. Incentivize Birthdays
Restaurants often ignore this. When you announced your birthday in the 1990s, you would receive a free slice of chocolate cake with sprinkles, and Grandma would give you five dollars. Nowadays, all you get are sympathies. But how can you counter this? Through gamification!
As a birthday gift, you might give people who have provided you with their contact information—including date of birth and email address—a coupon to use at your restaurant. Or perhaps you can establish a name for your restaurant as an eatery that offers complimentary nachos to anyone who shows an ID card that clearly indicates their birthday. So, take the birthday crowd onboard.
6. Take the Social Media Bull by Horns
Social media is a giant option today that gives you enough options to remain one step ahead. With the help of some entertaining freebies, you may stimulate social media engagement, like comments, shares, likes, and content production. This is an excellent approach to promoting your ISO-certified restaurant while spending little money on advertising. Resharing a post is free for users, so they’ll probably do it if the incentive is compelling enough.
Maybe you offer a free coffee that day to the first 50 people who share and like your post. Alternatively, perhaps ten people will be fortunate enough to receive a 50% discount on their subsequent dinner (valid for up to two people per meal). There are no boundaries!
Moreover, more people will learn about you if you can get people to produce free material for you, such as pictures and videos that include your restaurant and tag you on Facebook or Instagram. It will increase your internet visibility and, ideally, your sales. Following that, you can share the material with your current followers.
7. Pre Order
Offering prizes for BOPIS or buying online in-store pick-up is a wonderful way to boost business at your restaurant. This can involve the customer placing an order, paying for it ahead of time, and getting an electronic stamp when they pick up their product.
This provides you an advantage over the competition by enabling you to predict how much money you will make in a single night.
If you are a restaurant owner and have a website, adding gamification should be your priority. However, you should have an e-commerce-friendly website to do that. To make your restaurant website eCommerce-friendly, head on over to the restaurant’s WooCommerce plugin.
Restaurant for WooCommerce offers you multiple customization options to make your website customer-centric. You can create a menu with different delivery options. There is so much you can get from this plugin. So, a gamification plugin with Restaurant for WooCommerce plugin is perfect for improving your revenue graph.
Wrap Up
Anything too simple to obtain loses appeal, but a game that is too challenging or extensive to be worthwhile also loses its appeal. Finding the ideal balance between your goals and your customers is key to using gamification effectively. If you do your math, gamification is a low-risk tactic. And as long as your rewards make your customers happy, you are on the right track to raising customer engagement.
