What if the most innovative loyalty programs came from the bakery? This article aims to give bakers who want to build customer loyalty by digitizing their points of sale a head start.
We illustrated them (in a projective way) with Maison Kayser bakeries, an international benchmark. But these ideas can be applied to any multi-store bakery chain.
Loyalty, subscription, community, private sales, gift wheels, Google reviews and nearby businesses: discover lots ofideas to combine to [.is--yellow-highlight]create your bakery chain's loyalty program[.is--yellow-highlight].
Bakeries have both a regular clientele and strong competition from passing customers. The latter are customers who come because they choose the nearest good bakery (or one on their route), but who may go to another bakery tomorrow.
With an engaging, dematerialized loyalty card, you can ensure that as many of these occasional customers as possible join your regular clientele.
How do we do it? By awarding points to be accumulated on a dematerialized loyalty card, giving access to gifts.
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The particularity of bakeries is their high customer flow, which leaves little or no time for sales staff to talk about the loyalty program.
In this context, the best way to draw customers' attention to the dematerialized bakery loyalty card is to display it [.is--yellow-highlight]on a tablet[.is--yellow-highlight]. This should be prominently displayed in your outlet, but slightly offset from the cash register so as not to slow down the queue.
The tablet is all you need to discover the rewards, sign up quickly and collect your first points. It allows you to sign up a maximum number of customers without slowing down the flow at peak times.
With the Hey Pongo loyalty tablet, it's possible to show off the gifts that can be won by accumulating points. In 15 seconds, a customer can join the Maison Kayser loyalty program by entering his or her telephone number.
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With the tablet for stand-alone use, there's no extra work for employees. With its playful mechanism, Hey Pongo can enroll up to a quarter of the customer flow in the loyalty program.
Enrolled customers return more often, but also spend more. By setting up a 1€ spent = 1 point accumulation scheme, they are encouraged to spend more to reach their rewards faster. On average, Hey Pongo's loyal customers have [.is--yellow-highlight]an average basket that's 37.5% higher[.is--yellow-highlight].
Subscription is a very promising way of taking customer commitment even further. It is particularly well suited to Kayser bakeries, which have a very diverse customer base. For the quality of a traditional loaf, many customers come almost every day to buy their baguette, bread or coffee.
This clientele of regulars is highly conducive to the creation of a subscription. It's a win-win situation: the brand creates recurring income, and customers pay less for their everyday purchases.
For [.is--yellow-highlight]35€ per month[.is--yellow-highlight], a free baguette every day
For [.is--yellow-highlight]25€ a month[.is--yellow-highlight], a free hot drink every day before work
Subscription can be offered very simply, via a QR Code to be scanned at the point of sale. The monthly fee is paid by phone, and customers can collect their privileges simply by showing their Maison Kayser Subscription Pass!
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Loyalty programs, subscriptions or both: these commitments help to create a community of Maison Kayser customers.
To consolidate it, we're going to offer benefits reserved for members of the program. The aim is to play on FOMO (Fear of missing out), to encourage customers to join the Kayser Club.
So, like Panera Bread in the United States, we're going to ritualize "Loyalty Weeks": private sales with exclusive benefits reserved for members of the loyalty program. It's a good way of making everyone want to join the Club.
Maison Kayser tries to do all kinds of things to create a community around the brand: partnerships with other brands in the same universe, donations to charities, recipe books...
We're going to materialize this whole universe in the rewards of the loyalty program, combining classic rewards with others that are very much part of the Kayser ecosystem.
The backdrop to this community will be the Kayser Academy: rich content offered to the community, including recipes by Eric Kayser with other Michelin-starred chefs.
We're going to use the loyalty program to co-create this content with customers, by getting them to vote for the next recipe they'd like to see, for example.
To create an extremely close relationship with the community, we'll let members who voted for the winning recipe know that their voice has been heard and that the recipe they requested is available on video.
Objective: to create a continuous "relational ping-pong" between the brand and its customers.
When you read the Google reviews of Kayser bakeries, you realize that an unexpected clientele comes in regularly: young people and students, who use Too Good To Go to pick up a basket at a good price.
We're going to get in touch with this clientele and try to build loyalty by getting them to come to us on occasions other than Too Good To Go.
To do this, we'll first try to collect a point of contact with these customers.
How?
The bakery / patisserie business requires perfect local SEO. Searches for "boulangerie batignolles" are numerous (tourists, mobile customers, new neighborhood customers).
[.is--yellow-highlight]Every month, over 300,000 people search for "boulangerie à proximité" on Google[.is--yellow-highlight], in France alone.
That's potential sales you don't want to miss out on.
We're going to work on this local referencing by playing on a hyper-impacting factor in Google ranking: the number of reviews.
By Google's own admission, the number of reviews is the3rd most important referencing criterion on Google Maps and on the local Pack, the insert of local businesses that appears on results pages.
Of course, [.is--yellow-highlight]collecting reviews is tricky in the bakery business[.is--yellow-highlight] because it's a commodity business that brings together customers with very heterogeneous profiles.
So we're going to call on those who are best placed to boost the number of bakery reviews: repeat customers, by automatically sending each VIP a message asking them to post a review on Google.
To increase conversion, we play on the cognitive bias of reciprocity by offering them something before making the request.
Thanks to this simple scenario, we're going to considerably increase the number of bakery reviews (we're regularly doing x20 at Pongo).
The explosion in the number of reviews means that each outlet is positioned in the Top 3 on strategic local searches.
Maison Kayser is in the process of developing its offer, in particular by trying to attract businesses (breakfast delivery, catering, etc.).
Good news: almost all Kayser customers have their own business.
By asking these B2C customers questions, we can create B2B opportunities.
We're going to identify individual customers who could be business customers (who could order Kayser through their company).
This survey, dedicated to Club Kayser members, will also enable us to identify those who are the real decision-makers in their company.
We'll then create targeted marketing campaigns for customers who answered "Yes, and I'll take care of it", offering them the chance to test Kayser's B2B offer.
A good way to acquire and cross-sell from your own customers
Inspired by a LinkedIn post by Nicolas Samir
