Customer Management Strategies

Strategies to Filter Out Deal-Seekers: Challenges of Retaining Customers in High-End Dining

You open a high-end specialty restaurant, and in order to attract traffic, you use the restaurant’s signature dish to make a set menu, and cooperate with the group buying website at a loss-making price. You hope to attract more customers to your restaurant through this group buying campaign, and they will come back for more. After the launch of the group buying campaign, the restaurant’s business did improve a lot and a large number of new customers came for the group purchase package. You’re very happy, but as soon as the group buying event ends, business almost immediately goes back to its former state, and it’s very deserted. You are very puzzled, what should I do?

To solve this “how” problem, we must first understand the essence of the problem:  “logic of “drainage + profit”. The purpose of group buying activities is to use special products as drainage products, bring traffic, and then make money through profit products. However, why is the traffic indeed coming, but the customer unit price is very low, and the repurchase rate has not improved?

The essence of this problem may be that there is a problem with the design of your group buying activity, which attracts professional “group buyers”.

Understanding Group buyers

What is a “group buyer”? In this world, many customers only buy goods when they are on sale, only spend on store promotions like Black Friday, and only enter the store when there are group buying activities. This part of the customer is called “group buyers”. You highly recommend them to try other specialties, but they do not purchase anything but group menus items; You warmly welcome them next time, but its likely they will never come again.

Group buying is a shrewd consumption strategy. However, for merchants, after sacrificing the profits of drainage products, “group buyers” do not consume profit products at all, which does not help the unit price and repurchase rate of customers. Therefore, from the perspective of merchants, how to attract “repeat customers” and filter out “group buyers” through ingenious design is an important topic when doing group buying activities.

How? Here are a few things you can try.

1. Don’t buy packages in groups.

If you are a barbecue restaurant, buy “beer + cold dishes” in a group, don’t buy barbecue in a group; If you are a Western restaurant, group purchase “red wine + appetizer + dessert”, do not buy the main course; If you are a movie theater, you can buy “movie tickets + popcorn” in a group, but do not buy drinks in a group. In short, don’t buy the full package in a group. An incomplete package gives repeat customers a reason to spend more, while filtering out “group buyers” who don’t want to spend more.

2. Don’t buy signature dishes in groups.

If you don’t buy signature dishes in groups, what are you buying in groups? You can buy highly profitable items in groups, such as salmon, caviar, red wine, imported ice cream, and so on. These items can attract customers with high spending power, while at the same time, leaving limited signature dishes for non-group customers. Repeat customers with high spending power will also order if they like it. This will also filter out group buyers who just want to try signature dishes at a low price.

3. Set up a special session for “group buyers”.

Is it really a complete rejection of “group buyers”? Not necessarily. You can serve group buyers through special activities. Although they can’t provide a higher “average order value” and more “repurchase rate”, they may be able to provide “word-of-mouth publicity”.

How?

If you are a hotel, you can take out the room from Monday to Thursday night for group purchase; If you are a movie theater, you can take out the movie tickets in the morning time and buy them in groups; If you are a KTV, you can take out the private room in the afternoon for group purchase. As long as you send a circle of friends and take a screenshot, you can enjoy a 2% discount.

Why? Because most people don’t watch movies in the morning, sing songs in the afternoon, and travel from Monday to Thursday, you can use the time gap to filter out the “group buyers” who are only looking for deals from the “repeat customers” you want to attract. These resources are also wasted, use them to attract group buyers, although you can’t expect more consumption, but at least through the “send moments and screenshots” activity, benefit from their “word-of-mouth publicity”.

So what should you do?

Looking back at these three methods of filtering “group buyers”, and then looking at the group buying activity of “making a set meal with signature dishes at dinner time”, it is simply sending an invitation letter with gold trim to the “group buyers”, and of course, as soon as the event is over, the business is deserted.

Maybe you can do it another way: 9.9 yuan, buy two glasses of Princess Diana’s collection of red wine, and come with candlelight and violin music. This attracts men who want to show their romance in front of their girlfriends, will they drink the red wine in one sip, then put the candle in their bag and leave?

Summary

Finally, let’s wrap it up. What is a group buyer? In this world, many customers only buy goods when they are on sale, only spend on Singles’ Day, and only enter the store when there is a group buying event. This part of the customer is called “group buyers”. Group buyers consume a lot of your drainage resources, but do not buy your profit products, which will not help the customer unit price and repurchase rate. How should merchants fight with group buyers? There are three ways you can try: don’t buy a package in a group, don’t buy signature dishes in a group, and set up a special session for group buyers.