Guide
How to increase repeat customers in a café
A café lives or dies on frequency. One customer visiting weekly for a year is worth roughly fifty walk-ins, and costs a fraction as much to keep.
· 7 min read
Start with the operational causes
Before any loyalty scheme, look at the two things that break habits: inconsistency and queue time. A customer who gets a different drink depending on who is on shift will drift, and a commuter who misses their train once will not risk it again. No amount of stamps fixes either.
Then make the habit explicit
Most café visits are unconsidered. A loyalty card intervenes at exactly the moment a customer is choosing between you and the shop across the road on a day when they do not much care. That is a small edge applied often, which is what compounds.
Find the lapsed before they are gone
A customer who visited weekly and has not been seen for a month has broken a routine, not made a decision. Between thirty and sixty days you are asking someone to resume something familiar. After that you are asking them to start something new, which is far harder.
Measure the right thing
Total members is a vanity number. The number that matters is the share of members who visit more than once, and after that, the share still visiting three months later. If the first is low your offer is wrong; if the second is low your café is.
Questions
- What is a good repeat rate for a café?
- It varies enormously by format and location, so treat your own first month as the baseline and aim to beat it. The trend for your café matters far more than a benchmark from someone else’s.
- Is discounting a good way to increase repeat visits?
- Broad discounting trains customers to wait for the discount. A loyalty reward is targeted at frequency instead, which is why it holds up better over time.
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