5 Proven Strategies Coffee Shops Use to Boost Profits | Starbucks, Panera & More

Maybe you're running a coffee shop that isn't as profitable as you'd like it to be, or maybe foot traffic has slowed down or you notice that people are coming in, they order once, but then you don't see them again. Honestly, this is really common today. With today's economic pressures rising, costs around acquiring customers and retaining customers is going up. But we've seen some really good strategies here at per diem that help coffee shops like you really retain customers without having to slash your prices. And so today I'm going to jump into five strategies that you can implement in order to do this. First up, store credit with bonuses. We offer this and most of our coffee shops and restaurants on per diem use this feature. Essentially it's like a pay 45, get 50 in store credit. Starbucks popularized this feature in their app by letting people load up money and then you get double points when you use your Starbucks wallet. When you purchase stuff through the app. Most of our customers are doing like a little bit of an incentive there, like $5. Again, pay 45 get 50. Once I have that $50 in your app, I spend it faster. My average order size goes up. If I'm looking for coffee that morning, obviously I'm going to go to the app because I already have that cash sitting there. And then it acts as a bank because again, you get that cash ahead of time and so you're able to fund operations and so forth through this mechanism. It's kind of a no brainer. About 15% of all transactions on our apps use store credit. Another way to boost repeat orders without discounting are daily streaks. So this is similar to like the Duolingo app where we're kind of gamifying the experience of people coming to your store. And so they'll see like basically like a little streak indicator. And you can set this in your merchant dashboard depending on how many days you want to do it. If you're a coffee shop, I've seen people do it for more like, you know, three, four, even five days. But if you're a restaurant, maybe just two days in a row. So I'll get a push notification after I come to your restaurant. I spend at least let's say 10 or $15. And then I'll say, hey, if you come again, you'll get extra points. Obviously this is the next day, not the same day. And so this forces this kind of like repeat visits to your store and then I'll get a little reward after that. You can give them additional store credit or you can Give them points if you offer square loyalty. And it's a really fun and engaging way to really incentivize your customers. The third way to drive repeat orders without discounting are push notifications. So we offer marketing push notifications through per diem. And this is really only something that you can offer if you have a mobile app. These are unlike sms, they're native notifications that come either on your iPhone or your Android phone. They have your logo associated with it and when I tap on them, I go directly into the app. But so we see our customers, whether they're coffee shops, bakeries, restaurants, sending out push notifications with updates on, you know, new fall lineup. So we got our pumpkin spice latte rolling out this fall, or let's say you got some freshly baked croissants that you're just bringing out of the oven right now. It's a great time to send a push, remind people that you're there. The great thing is push notifications have a 90% open rate. This is compared to 23% for email. And the reason is it's right there on your phone. Again, people recognize the brand. It's not coming from some random phone number like an sms and, and it's really just like on point personalized and it just converts. Another great way to build recurring visits and lock in that loyalty are with subscriptions and memberships. We kind of took a page out of the Panera Playbook and here in New York City, Blank Street Coffee uses these subscriptions really to build in that loyalty. And so people will Pay, let's say $30 a month or, you know, less every week. And they'll get either discounts on every cup of coffee or they'll get free cups of coffee, let's say once or twice a day. And, and so you really set the price, you set how many items you want to be able to give. And this really, you know, locks in that retention. If I get one cup of coffee for every day, then obviously I'm going to go and get that cup of coffee from you every day. And then if you're offering like a discount on croissants, then hey, I'll also throw in a croissant there, right? So Fresh Baguette. They're a small bakery chain that works with us. They have seven stores across Washington, D.C. maryland, Virginia. They have over 100 members in their, in their program and it works like a charm for them. It's really their only major loyalty play. You can implement this easily with your own app and pretty soon we're going to be bringing this to web ordering as well. The fifth thing that drives repeat visits without discounting are limited time seasonal drops. And an app is perfect for this. So Starbucks and McDonald's have popularized this Starbucks with their pumpkin spice latte. You can do the same. And then you can leverage the app to send out push notifications, to put up banners that have great visuals in them showcasing your drinks, and to even offer different types of promotions if you want to do it that way. But again, you don't have to offer these types of promotions. There's plenty of ways just to highlight them. Send out a push notification to your guests, get them excited, get them to tap that push notification, go into your app, order that item, and then come in. And then you can lock them in in one of the ways that we mentioned before. Either they're getting, you know, buying store credit, or maybe they're subscribing to something that you have. But you don't have to just do this. Around the fall, it has been popularized here, but really these can be leveraged all year round. And then using your app and email and social media as communication methods to really get the word out there and get people to think about you when the weather is changing. So those are five proven ways to drive repeat orders without discounting. We see coffee shops, restaurants, bakeries, using all these strategies to really lock in that customer retention. The one thing that I will say is that you probably need an app to do this because an app in itself does lock in loyalty. When people go to your website and they gotta log in and add a credit card, it just doesn't have that same personalized feel. If you do want to create an app, we build an app in 24 hours at per diem and they start at just $99 a month. Seamless integration with Square. If you want, book a demo with our team, check us out at triperdium. Com. Good luck, everyone.