As 2021 unfolds, it is clear that the COVID-19 pandemic won’t be ending anytime soon. As a result, restaurants continue facing new challenges, especially regarding consumer engagement.
“All the traditional methods of reaching customers have been interrupted, and restaurants are going to have to reach consumers in new ways,” says Tom Byrnes, vice president of marketing for LedgerPay.
NPD Group reported that drive-thru purchases jumped 26 percent last year, and wait times increased by an average of 30 seconds. Meanwhile, delivery orders through third-party platforms, such as Uber Eats or Doordash grew by 67 percent in March 2020 alone. Yet, restaurants cannot count on this traction continuing.
A recent Deloitte study reported that only 15.1 percent of all quick-service customers ever downloaded a restaurant’s app, while 67.2 percent never downloaded one at all. Furthermore, more than 90 percent of users abandon their apps within 90 days, leaving restaurants blind to the behavior of most customers.
“Apps are high friction by nature, because customers have to download them, remember to fill out all the fields, and then use them,” Byrnes says. “LedgerPay can solve that problem, because we can instantly give restaurants 100-percent visibility into all their customers whether they are enrolled in a loyalty program or not.”
LedgerPay works by creating individualized customer profiles through the payment system without the need for a loyalty program.
“If I go to a restaurant and order lunch, LedgerPay sees the card I paid with and everything I ordered,” Byrnes says. “Then, the next time I order, the system matches that card to the database of information it’s built about my behavior and purchases without needing any other identifiers from an app or loyalty card.
Then, LegerPay can make personalized promotional offers in real time at the ordering kiosk, on a receipt, or even at the POS terminal. Additionally, rather than offering a standard 10 percent off or buy-one-get-one promotion, LedgerPay’s AI-algorithms can create customized offers that are more likely to incentivize guest behaviors, or it can make offers that align with the brand’s goals.
For example, James Becker, vice president of business development and strategic partnerships at Ledger Pay, suggests that while a breakfast chain wouldn’t need to incentivize its loyal breakfast customers to return in the morning, it might want to give them an offer to visit at lunch or dinner, too.
“We’re doing for brick-and-mortar what Amazon did for online commerce,” Becker says. “Not only do we help restaurants target the right customers, but we also give their marketing departments complete granular visibility into their customers’ preferences, which they can use to create new strategies. And we also help them sell their real-time data back to CPGs, which will pay a premium for this type of data.”
And best of all, LedgerPay is entirely platform agnostic, so restaurants can continue using their existing POS, payment processors, and loyalty programs in addition to the software.
“We sit at the nexus of loyalty, payment, and consumer insights,” Byrnes says. “While other companies might claim to do all those things, we’re the only ones who really can. Our database and analytics are built to help restaurants gather and leverage the information they need to be successful.”
To learn more about how LedgerPay can help you transform your loyalty program, visit ledgerpay.com.
