Build a Restaurant Retention Engine
Generated by Klaviyo AI
Restaurants can apply ecommerce strategies to turn online ordering data into stronger lifecycle, retention, and loyalty marketing. The approach combines guest data collection, automated messaging, integrated restaurant technology, and digital acquisition to encourage repeat orders.
- Collect guest data: Use website pop-ups, sign-up forms, and in-store QR codes to capture guests’ emails and phone numbers.
- Automate retention: Build loyalty, cross-sell, and win-back flows using customer and order data.
- Pair acquisition: Run digital acquisition alongside retention marketing to keep bringing new guests into the lifecycle system.
- Connect restaurant systems: Layer a marketing platform over POS and ordering tools so collected data can support follow-up and repeat visits.
As founder and CEO of In Social, a full-service, Klaviyo Gold Master Partner digital marketing agency that acts as the outsourced marketing department for our clients, I've spent the last decade building the team most restaurants don't have, but that all restaurants need. And what they need is a team, like In Social (a Shopify Plus partner) who knows ecommerce.
Because, when you really look at the restaurant industry, especially after placing your lunch order online, you realize that you are placing an online order just the same, and that restaurants have their own ecommerce experiences - they’re just usually pretty poor ones. That’s because the industry is too technologically behind to see it.
Think about it: as a restaurateur, where do most of your orders come from? If not from third-party platforms like Uber or DoorDash, most of your guests already order online or through your website, if you allow them to. And when customers order online from your restaurant, that means you already have a “customer journey,” whether you've mapped it or not. That means you have the chance to lean into ecommerce marketing strategies, like focusing on lifecycle, retention, and loyalty marketing to bring your guests back, and back more often.
The tools to do all of that at the highest level already exist. Most restaurants just don't know they're available, and the restaurant tech they're already running often can't do the job, or doesn’t do it well.
After years of applying ecommerce marketing to our restaurant brand roster, here's what I've learned about bridging the gap between restaurant operators and ecommerce-level marketing, and what you can do about it.
You're already running an ecommerce business. You just don't call it that.
Strip away the kitchen and the dining room, and a restaurant's digital business looks almost identical to any ecommerce brand's. Guests order online. They interact with your site or app before they ever interact with your food (also known as your product). The fundamentals (e.g., a good website, clean data, a reason for guests to come back) matter just as much here as they do for any online retailer.
Of course, the differences are meaningful:
- Check size tends to be smaller (otherwise referred to as Average Order Value or AOV).
- Delivery is immediate instead of a multi-day shipping window.
- Third parties like Uber Eats and DoorDash sit between you and your guest similarly to how Amazon sits between a shopper and a DTC brand.
Zoomed out, and it's the same equation: a guest interacts with your brand online. You want to (nay, need to) know who they are, you want them to (need them to) order again, and the more often they do, the better your bottom line looks.
Once you see the "customer journey" and "retention" in that way, the less these terms sound like ecommerce jargon and the more they start sounding like exactly what they are: how restaurants keep guests coming back.
Loyalty and retention engines only work if you keep feeding them
Once you have guest data flowing somewhere useful, there is a whole library of lifecycle marketing automations you can build that, when done correctly, can generate your restaurant money while you sleep. Some of our favorite restaurant automations include: reward/loyalty flows that gift customers after they have spent a dollar amount within a certain time frame, cross-sell flows that offer customers menu items similar to ones they have purchased in the past, and win-back flows that contact customers who haven’t ordered in a while, just to name a few.
How do these automations work? By leveraging the customer and order data you already have and are collecting. But a retention engine on its own will run dry. You'll lose customers who move, unsubscribe, or have one bad visit and never come back.
So if you're not also bringing in new guests, through Google Ads, Meta Ads, organic social, maybe even Reddit, depending on your market and budget, you're just recycling a shrinking list that will eventually dwindle—and stop making you money.
Newspaper and radio ads alone, even with a QR code slapped on them, won't refill that funnel the way digital acquisition will. Retention marketing and paid acquisition have to run together, or neither one does its job for long.
Most restaurants need a marketer who can run Google + Meta Ads
Restaurant chains operating on a mass scale get digital marketing. But the 5- or 10-location operator, which makes up a huge share of this industry, usually doesn't have a marketing department.
At most, there's one marketing manager who is tasked with both in-house and online marketing, without the skills for both. That one marketing manager is thinking about table toppers, point-of-sale (POS) materials, menus, local public relations, and radio spots, while trying to balance making website updates without the ability to code. They’re also trying to run the social media pages without having the time to create necessary content, and are burning money running digital ads because they don’t really know how to run them properly.
That’s because each of those marketing touchpoints requires a separate and unique set of skills that one person rarely possesses. And if they do, there isn’t enough time in the day to manage it all.
Very rarely have I come across a restaurant group with a marketing employee who actually knows how to run a Google Ads or Meta Ads campaign, and this is at the biggest detriment to the restaurant’s bottom line. That's not a knock on restaurant operators, but it’s the fact that it’s easy to spend money on digital ads, but it’s not easy to spend money on digital ads that are profitable. And the skill is not one learned in the restaurant industry, but one learned from ecommerce.
That gap is exactly why so many restaurants default to spend their ad dollars to whoever's calling them. Local radio and newspaper sales teams pitch restaurants directly, so that's where the marketing budget goes, because it's the only one actively selling itself.
However, those traditional media buys often don’t funnel, or at least don’t funnel customers in any scalable way, into the restaurant’s customer journey. Instead, they get a few quick hits, a few orders, and the value of their traditional media buy is capped out.
What the restaurateur doesn’t realize is that, when run correctly, the value of every dollar spent on digital ads can make them far more than what they make from their traditional media buys, because it can push people into a repeatable and scalable lifecycle system that converts orders. With the proper ecommerce tools, that value is trackable, tangible, and measurable.
It’s one thing to have a lifecycle and retention system in place, but it’s another thing if there is no consistent flow of net new users flowing through it. When run properly, digital ads are the key to running and scaling a successful lifecycle marketing strategy.
What your POS and online ordering system can’t do on its own
Even restaurants that do get online ordering right often can't do the basics any ecommerce brand takes for granted, like following up with a guest who abandons an online order or someone who browses the menu without ordering. Unfortunately, most restaurant software doesn’t even have the code to track users who abandon their online orders to be able to follow up, which is a standard trackable metric for ecommerce.
Toast and Thanx power a huge amount of restaurant online ordering, and if you're running your ordering through platforms like these, the only way to get the most from the data they collect is to leverage you need at least one real marketing integration on top of them. Otherwise, that guest data is being wasted.
Klaviyo already integrates with the systems most restaurants run on, including Toast, Thanx, Square, Olo, OpenTable, and Punchh, which is the minimum bar for actually using the data you're collecting.
The bigger issue is that most restaurant guests never become a real profile in a restaurant’s tech stack in the first place. They checkout as guests, they order through third-party platforms that don’t hand over the guests information, or they order in-person, without being asked for their email or phone number for a profile to be created of them.
That’s why we always recommend and support our restaurants in training their employees on how to collect guest information—the data is the restaurant's most valuable asset. Half the time, a guest ordering at the counter never hands over their email at all. If they order through a third-party app, you don't get their contact info regardless.
The number of restaurant websites without a simple email pop-up to capture that valuable data is still shockingly high. When I speak to restauranteurs and ask them why they don’t have one to collect zero-party data, they usually look back at me confused, not understanding the value of zero-party data.
It’s probably because nobody told them what a productive starting point a pop-up can be for gathering zero-party data, which is the foundation of every ecommerce marketing strategy everything else is built on.
Start collecting zero-party data now, not once you "figure out marketing"
When I explain the importance of first-party and zero-party data and why a pop-up is necessary, nine times out of ten, I see a pop-up appear on that restaurant’s website within mere days. The effectiveness of the pop-up is usually questionable, but I always commend them for taking action. Then I explain the importance of conversion rates on forms, and how to leverage Klaviyo’s A/B test features to do that.
Getting your guests' emails and phone numbers from day one, however small a restaurant is, is the most important thing it can do you are. That's first-party and zero-party data, and it's the foundation everything else is built on.
A pop-up on your website is the easiest place to start, but that’s not all. In-store, a banners, posters, POS posters, or table toppers with QR codes that lead to a sign-up form are just as important. Offering a reward or discount for signing up usually helps sweeten the deal, but what offer works best can be tested. whether on the walls, table toppers, or at the POS at checkout or on the table works too, though what makes sense depends on your setup: counter service, table service, a kiosk, or something else.
The good news is that creating a website pop-up, a sign-up form, and promoting it around your store doesn’t need an entire marketing department. None of this requires a marketing department. But it does require the decision to do it and a person who can make it happen.
3 things you can do this week to advance your restaurant marketing
- Add pop-up to your website. Don't overthink what you'll send after capture. Just start collecting that zero-party data.
- Put a sign-up QR code where guests already are. This could mean at the register, on the table, or on the receipt, whatever fits your set-up, to get more guests into your list in person.
- Check what your online ordering platform can actually hand off. If your POS or ordering system can't identify data like abandoned orders or repeat-visit data on its own, you need a marketing platform layered on top that can use that data once it's there. (Hint, that’s what Klaviyo is for.)
How to increase customer loyalty in a restaurant
Most restaurant tech was built to run a kitchen and a dining room and not support a marketing department. It wasn't built to facilitate the level of marketing that ecommerce brands take for granted: a single, unified view of each guest instead of data scattered across your POS system, online ordering, loyalty tools, and automated flows triggered by real-time guest behavior, and service and marketing sharing the same data instead of living in separate systems.
That's what a B2C CRM built for guest relationships looks like, and it's what Klaviyo is designed to do.
Support conversations live in the same place too, through Klaviyo Service, so a guest reaching out with a question is still part of the same relationship you're trying to build, not a dead end in a separate system.
All this requires is that you treat your digital guests the way ecommerce brands already treat theirs, which is a much smaller leap than it looks like from the outside.
If you want the fuller playbook, my team at In Social put together a free guide on lifecycle and retention marketing for restaurants, including the industry benchmarks you should check your own numbers against.
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