Loyalty Redefined: Best Practices for Implementing a Successful Restaurant Loyalty Program

In today's competitive restaurant industry, cultivating customer loyalty is essential for long-term success. A well-designed loyalty program can not only encourage repeat business but also foster deeper connections with your customer base. However, implementing an effective loyalty program requires careful planning and execution. In this post, we'll discuss best practices we have identified for restaurants looking to create and implement a successful loyalty program that drives engagement, retention, and revenue.

1. Define Clear Objectives: Before launching a loyalty program, clearly define your objectives and goals. Are you aiming to increase customer retention, boost average order value, or attract new customers? Understanding your objectives will help you tailor your loyalty program to align with your business priorities and measure its success effectively.

2. Keep it Simple: When designing your loyalty program, simplicity is key. Avoid overly complicated point systems or tiered structures that may confuse or overwhelm customers. Instead, opt for a straightforward rewards system that is easy to understand and participate in. For example, a points-based system where customers earn points for every purchase and redeem them for rewards is simple and effective.

3. Offer Meaningful Rewards: Choose rewards that are meaningful and valuable to your customers. Consider offering a mix of discounts, free items, exclusive perks, or experiential rewards that enhance the overall dining experience. Tailor your rewards to reflect your brand and resonate with your target audience's preferences and lifestyle.

4. Personalize the Experience: Leverage customer data and insights to personalize the loyalty experience for each customer. Collect information such as purchase history, frequency of visits, and favorite menu items to deliver targeted offers and promotions. Personalization not only strengthens customer engagement but also builds a stronger emotional connection with your brand.

5. Promote Across Channels: Promote your loyalty program across various channels to maximize visibility and participation. Utilize in-store signage, table tents, menu inserts, and staff training to educate customers about the program. Leverage digital channels such as your website, social media, email newsletters, and mobile apps to reach customers wherever they are and drive sign-ups.

6. Encourage Engagement: Encourage active participation in your loyalty program by offering incentives for customers to join and engage with the program. Consider running special promotions, double points days, or bonus point offers to incentivize sign-ups and repeat visits. Engage with members through targeted communications, surveys, and exclusive offers to keep them coming back for more.

7. Monitor and Measure Performance: Regularly monitor and measure the performance of your loyalty program to track key metrics such as enrollment rates, redemption rates, and customer retention. Analyze data to identify trends, preferences, and opportunities for improvement. Use insights gained to refine your program over time and optimize its effectiveness.

8. Reward Advocacy and Referrals: Encourage customers to become brand advocates by rewarding them for referrals and social sharing. Offer incentives such as bonus points or exclusive rewards for referring friends and family to join the loyalty program. Encourage user-generated content and word-of-mouth marketing to amplify your brand's reach and influence.

By following these best practices, restaurants can create and implement a successful loyalty program that strengthens customer relationships, drives repeat business, and sets the stage for long-term growth and success.

Lumiere Guide to Selecting and Implementing Time and Attendance Solutions

Efficient tracking of time and attendance is critical to managing most businesses. Besides helping facilitate efficient payroll processing and client invoicing, time and attendance solutions can provide insights into your business’s profitability that leads to better decisions and efficient management of your human resources.

Lumiere has helped our clients adopt time and attendance solutions resulting in significant benefits, including:

Profitability Analysis

• Project costing and profitability insight

• Streamlined client invoicing for service industries

• Departmental costing reporting

Resource Management

• Efficient integration into payroll solutions

• Improved resource management and expenditure control

• Employee tracking through geolocation and geofencing

• Compliant management of  paid time off (PTO) policies

Before You Get Started - Involve the Stakeholders 

The first step to determining the best software solution is to understand your requirements are. The best way to do this is to work with internal resources and stakeholders that would benefit from or interact with the platform. Start by answering the following questions from resources in the following areas:

• Finance - Are analytics the finance department performs to track departmental or project costs or other critical metrics for profitability?

• Operations - What workflows involve scheduling, forecasting, or reporting needs?

• Payroll - What are the requirement of the existing or proposed payroll platform?

• Technology - Are there management, hosting, integration considerations for the new system?

This collaboration also helps deliver stakeholder buy-in and better adoption of the implemented solution. The requirements gathering phase is also an excellent opportunity to evaluate, propose, and implement changes to your current workflows, policies, and procedures. 

Make your Selection

Lumiere recommends you evaluate the following features in a time and attendance solution:

• Usability - The interface should be intuitive and easy to use

• Configuration - Should be straightforward and rule or macro-driven

• Integration - Choose a solution that has integrates with the existing solutions

• Compliance - Management of compliance rules should be automatic and proactive

• Auditable - Transparent and accessible logs of who did what and when are critical

• Comprehensive - Your solution should cover all your time and attendance related needs 

Solutions to evaluate 

For our own utilization and our clients’ benefit, Lumiere is always evaluating the best-of-breed cloud-based time and attendance solutions available for companies managing groups of employees. Here are a few of our favorites.

• TSheets - Easily integrated into Quickbooks. Enables resources to track time on multiple devices and managers to see who's working, where, and on what, all in real-time

• Harvest - Simple online time-tracking software that allows the tracking of resources and projects and the efficient creation of client invoices

• Deputy - Platform that supports numerous industries and allows for budget based scheduling

• Zenefits - Allows resources to record their time from any device and managers to approve time submissions in seconds. Syncs employee hours directly to payroll

• Homebase - Assists with employee onboarding, schedule creation, and forecasting. Great for service-based industries

• Ximble - Web-based time tracking solution that delivers IP restricted and GPS time clocking through text or phone, a mobile app with GPS tagging and geofencing

• FreshBooks - Helps track hours spent on clients or projects for accurate billing and job-costing

• Run powered by ADP - Offers small businesses the HR and payroll services they need to run their business, every day and every step of the way

Ensure success

Following our guide by establishing solution requirements, involving key stakeholders, and selecting a solution that integrates well into your existing business will go a long way towards a successful implementation. By following strong project management methodologies, leveraging your vendors’ implementation support, and providing training to your users will also contribute to your efforts’ success.

Every period of your company’s growth can bring both challenges and opportunities. Growing your business to the point that time and attendance solutions are required is strong evidence of your firm’s success. Take advantage of the contributions time and attendance solutions will provide to your business and continue your success. 

Compelling Call-to-Actions That Actually Get Clicked

A call-to-action, or CTA, is just what it sounds like. It literally calls the consumer to take action. What encourages your audience to act on your content. Whether that’s gaining a subscription, following an account, or promoting an interaction, a call to action helps complete a marketing objective. CTA’s are typically brief 2-3 worded sentences at the end of content, such as “Get Started” “Learn More” or “Sign Up”. 

CTA’s are important because they guide your users through the marketing funnel, clearly outlining what their next step should engage with your content. Some call-to-action best practices are:

1. Be brief

An effective call to action is short and sweet, quickly letting your audience know what to do next. Use a strong verb and end with an exclamation point. Register Now! Lengthier CTA’s should be avoided, but using a call to value can hammer in the benefits of your audience. For example, Register now and get 15% off your first order! 

2. Be urgent

Creating a sense of urgency in your call to action is an effective way to get conversions. Adding words and phrases such as “limited” “last chance” “back in stock” “just for you” and “ends soon” encourages individuals to act faster.

3. Get personal

Call-to-actions tailored to the individual receiving them, have been proven much more effective than generic “Sign up Now!” phrases. By accessing the data of the visitor, you can target CTA’s with their name, location, browser language, whether the customer is already registered/subscribed, etc. Personalized CTAs are proven to convert 202% better than the default.

4. Visual Appeal

Use a contrasting, bright color to get your site visitor’s attention and draw them to the CTA button. You want the CTA to be the first thing the user notices on the page: it’s the most important piece of information anyways. A button is much easier for the visitor to click rather than a hyperlink, graphic, or photo, and humans are wired to click buttons on the page. 

Using these tips to build your call-to-action will help your visitors filter through the marketing funnel and give them a specific step to engage with your content. 

9 Ways to Dominate Marketing in Less Time

John Rampton, founder of the calendar productivity tool Calendar offers 9 tips on succeeding in marketing without cutting corners. Not surprisingly, outsourcing is towards the top of the list! The remainder of the suggestions are spot on as well.

"A growing business may feel like it doesn't have the bandwidth to accommodate marketing, but without marketing, it will stop growing. By taking a few steps to make marketing an incremental effort, you can ensure you get your company's name out without taking time away from the business itself."

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10 Essential Social Media Guidelines

Susan Gunelius, CEO of KeySplash Creative Inc., has authored a dozen books about marketing, branding, social media, copywriting and technology and is the founder and editor in chief of WomenOnBusiness.com, a blog for business women offers 10 essential social media guidelines companies should follow when trying to build engagement.

It’s vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and—perhaps most importantly— your bottom line.

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6 Technical SEO Mistakes That Can Reduce Traffic to Your Website

Lalit Sharma is the Founder & CEO of Ranking By SEO. A leading offshore SEO services company, providing services in the SEO market since 2005, describes 6 mistakes that can reduce traffic to your website along with suggestions on solving them.

“Without optimizing your website technically, you cannot achieve your web traffic objective. Everything will fall apart.”

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How to Unlock 2X More Engagement by Eliminating Lead Forms

Torrey Dye, a blogger with the Atlanata based firm Terminus whose platform provides an Account Based Marketing (ABM) approach that identifies, prioritizes, and engages target accounts with a multichannel sales outreach, provides empirical evidence to support what we at Lumiere have long suggested - removing lead forms can increase engagement by almost 100%.

Think of it - how often have you navigated away from a site instead of handing over your most precious asset - your email address!

"By removing the friction caused by asking people to fill out a web form, we’ve seen as much as 71% of people who click a link in a marketing email engage with our content. That’s more than a 100% increase in engagement!"

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How to Find Photos for Your Blog Posts

Mitt Ray, Founder of the site Social Media Writing provides the reasoning behind, suggestions and a number of resources to use to find quality photos to use in your blog post.

"Adding images can also help your content get more backlinks as found by Moz. This can boost traffic from SEO as backlinks play a key role in your posts’ search engine performance."

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5 Crucial Ingredients of a Successful B2B Digital Marketing Strategy

Vikas Chawla, Co-Founder of the offshore agency Social Beat offers 5 great recommendations for companies looking to build a strong reputation online. Delivering effective content that demonstrates thought leadership is obvious but some of the other recommendations are refreshingly simple and fresh compared to most available information.

"Digital marketing represents huge potential for the B2B space to expand their client base and grow their business. With these strategies, your brand can develop a strong and credible online presence to drive greater results"

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Employee vs Contractor, Exempt vs Non-exempt - Determining Worker Classification

Determining whether members of your workforce should be classified as employees or independent contractors can be difficult. The rules both the IRS and the states have established to determine their status are confusing and if you classify them incorrectly, there can be significant fines. Additionally, once a worker is established as being an employee, they are further designated as being exempt or nonexempt as it applies to the ability to receive overtime pay and other employee benefits.

Lumiere has put together the following guide to help answer many of the questions you might have when classifying your resources.

Independent Contractor (Self-Employed) or Employee?

One of the most critical distinctions a business owner will have to make is whether their resources are independent contractors or employees. Besides the compliance issues, this designation determines who pays the employer taxes which are almost 8% (6.2% for social security is 6.2% and 1.45% for Medicare)

Some key differences that establish a resource as a contractor:

• They determine their schedule, time frame for completing, work location.

• They do not participate in employee benefits from the employer.

• They are ineligible for unemployment in the event of a layoff or termination.

There are some downsides for workers that are classified as contractors

• They are responsible for all expenses incurred while completing the job.

• They are not protected by anti-discrimination and workplace safety laws

• Unless a contract states otherwise, they can be terminated at any time, for any reason.

In determining the categorization of a worker, at question is the degree of control the company holds over the resource and level of independence the resource has across three factors :

• Behavioral: Who determines what the worker does and how the worker does his or her job?

• Financial: Who controls the economic aspects of the resources job? How is the worker paid, are expenses reimbursed, do they provide their own tools/supplies, etc?

• Relationship: Do contracts exist between the worker and company, does the worker have other clients, are there any employee benefits ( pension, insurance, vacation, etc.) for their work?

• Companies should weigh all of these factors when determining whether a worker is an employee or independent contractor. While some factors may indicate that the worker is an employee, other factors can indicate they are an independent contractor. There is no “magic” or set a number of factors that “makes” the worker an employee or an independent contractor, and no one factor stands alone in making this determination.

The keys are to look at the entire relationship, consider the degree or extent of the right to direct and control, and finally, to document each of the factors used in coming up with the determination.

Form SS-8

If, after reviewing the three categories of evidence, it is still unclear whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor, Form SS-8, Determination of Worker Status for Purposes of Federal Employment Taxes and Income Tax Withholding (PDF) can be filed with the IRS. The form may be filed by either the business or the worker. The IRS will review the facts and circumstances and officially determine the worker’s status.

Be aware that it can take at least six months to get a determination, but a business that continually hires the same types of workers to perform particular services may want to consider filing the Form SS-8 (PDF). 

Misclassification of Employees

There are significant consequences of treating an employee as an independent contractor. If you classify an employee as an independent contractor and you have no reasonable basis for doing so, you may be held liable for employment taxes (withholding and social security) for that worker See Internal Revenue Code section 3509 for more information.

Use this chart to help you properly categorize your workers:

Item	Employee	Contractor
Employment Laws	Covered by a number of federal and state employment and labor laws	Not covered by employment and labor laws
Hiring Practice	Applicant receives a job offer. After a person accepts the position, the employer must ask for additional information about the employee such as date of birth, marital status, and citizenship status	Interacts with the person or department that needs the service completed. A contractor typically provides a proposal and enters into a contract with the legal or procurement department of the business.
Tax Documents	Provides name, address, Social Security number, tax filing status, and number of exemptions on a W-4	Provides name, address, Taxpayer Identification Number, and certification about back up through a W-9
Payer’s Tax Reporting Requirements	Reports all money paid to the employee during the tax year on a W-2	Reports payments of $600 or more in a calendar year on a Form 1099
Reporting to Other Agencies	Reports for state and federal Unemployment Insurance	None
Value of Work or Contract	Earns either an hourly rate or a salary	A contract may be for a total amount, an hourly, daily, or weekly amount that ends on a specific date or a total amount to be paid when the job is completed
When Paid	Federal and state laws require that an employee be paid on the normal pay date or earlier if the paycheck is not negotiable on the normal pay date, which can occur on holidays	Accounts Payable pays a contractor after receiving an invoice. The contract dictates when payments are made, such as upon completion of a task or by periodic amounts

Exempt vs. Nonexempt

After you have determined that your workers are employees, you will need to determine if they qualify for overtime wages when they work over 40 hours per week. The differences between nonexempt and exempt employees have been established by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The FLSA sets basic minimum wage and overtime pay standards and regulates the employment of minors. The FLSA does not regulate vacation, holiday, severance, sick pay, holidays off, or holiday pay among other things.

Employees that are classified as exempt typically perform job duties considered professional, executive or administrative. The US Department of Labor has a list of the more commonly used exemptions

California Rules

California also follows the three simple requirements to determine whether a worker is an exempt employee under California law:

1. Minimum Salary. The employee must be paid a salary that is at least twice the state minimum wage for full-time employment regardless if it is a salary or calculated hourly.

2. Managerial Duties. The employee’s primary duties must consist of administrative, executive, or professional tasks. Their job title is irrelevant.

3. Independent Judgment. The employee’s job duties must customarily involve the use of discretion and independent judgment while comparing and evaluating possible courses of action and making a decision after considering various possibilities.

If these three requirements are met, the employee will usually be classified as exempt from overtime, minimum wage, and rest break requirements (but not meal break requirements). There are, however, many caveats to this test. Some jobs that are subject to a different test altogether and some employees are only partially exempt; meaning, they are protected by certain labor laws, but not others. The State of California Department of Industrial Relations has provided guidance for exemptions from the overtime laws.

Take Employee Classification Seriously

Misclassification is one of the most common causes of lawsuits against employers, and it is not surprising to learn that regardless of the employer’s size, many have had to pay large amounts of money for misclassifying employees.

Lumiere’s recommends that employees treat worker classification seriously. Employers who maintain a cavalier attitude when addressing employee/contractor and exempt/non-exempt classifications could find themselves burdened with liabilities for fines, unpaid wages, interest, penalties, and most likely - attorney fees.