Increase Your Customer Base for Your Food Truck - Customer Loyalty for Food Trucks

Food truck entrepreneurs have taken street food to a new culinary level by serving restaurant quality meals out of a truck. Starting and becoming successful in this venture requires a few key components: innovation, creativity, and probably the most important customer loyalty. Building, maintaining and attracting a new customer base is difficult enough but when your shop is mobile you get a few new obstacles thrown your way. Here are a couple tips from Cafe Cartel to grow your customer loyalty for your food truck with our food truck point of sale software.

Establishing a Customer Base with Consistency and Convenience

When your food truck is starting out creating a customer base is sometimes tough. Make sure you're consistent to establish loyal customers.

Start out where you know a lot of hungry people will be. Metro areas, industrial parks or constructions sites are good to try out. Stop by a couple of office parks during lunch time.

Now that you’ve picked out a couple locations, create a route and time frames. Stay consistent so that customers who like your quick food on the go can find you again.

Try advertizing at the places you park by leaving a handout or quarter sheet at the leasing office or asking permission to leave a menu at the reception desk to generate interest.

Maintaining a Customer Base: :

1.) Customer Service: In many ways eating at a food truck is a very unique experience. By doing the the little bit extra your customers are more likely to leave with a positive association with your food truck. Thank them for supporting you with simple gestures:

Get to know your regulars. Have them fill out questionnaires or sign up for your loyalty program through email to get information for their customer profiles. Using the customer profile feature in the CRM section of Cafe Cartel’s Point of Sale you can monitor their favorite menu items, leave notes for your staff to recommend certain specials or wish them a happy birthday by including their birthdays on the calendar function. (You can scan their ID for easy customer profile creation too)

Something as simple as a receipt message or writing their name and a thank you message to give a personal touch. Do what works for your truck, and your overall message but make sure your customers feel appreciated for stopping by.

2.) Online presence The food truck following is huge on social media, make sure your online footprint is visible and easily accessible to your customers. Twitter is how one of the biggest food trucks in Los Angeles, Kogi, started marketing themselves and effectively changed the marketing landscape for food trucks.

Your website: Make sure it’s accessible, user friendly and clean. Connect your twitter or facebook feeds for updates on where and when you're going to be serving. Include any PR links you may have attracted and your menu!

Twitter: Twitter is ideal because it quickly messages your location and times directly to your followers for them to catch up to you.

Facebook: Facebook is a great platform to get information out and receive information from your customers. Post questions to your fans about where they would like to see you and post promos and daily specials, don’t forget pictures!

Instagram: The ultimate picture hub. Post pictures of specials, your line, your new digital menu board, babies eating your food, everything! Be active by posting about twice a day. Don’t forget to hashtag your trucks name when posting.

Yelp/Urbanspoon: Check these profiles periodically to see your stars, connect as much information as possible to these customer profiles i.e menu, pictures, website. Make sure you address negative reviews in your business practices (or see if you can get rid of fake nasty competitor reviews)

Manage all your accounts through Plum loyalty, Hootsuite, or Tweetdeck

3.) Integrate loyalty program Reward the loyalty of your frequent customers by establishing a program in Cafe Cartel’s loyalty program feature.

Create a points system that your POS keeps track of:

Encourage your customers to bring in friends or family to earn more points. (Keep the points easy and payouts reachable) Encourage social media marketing by giving point or rewards for checking in on foursquare or facebook.

Reward positive yelp reviews with half off coupon or a free item certificate.

One of the most effective loyalty programs are those that encourage customer engagement. You can achieve this with a milestone program. Milestone programs, set loyalty goals for your customers to achieve.

For example: A buy ten get one free option sets a goal for your customers and encourages customers to return. Keep track of customer purchases with your food truck POS.

Preset all of your loyalty program discounts in Cafe Cartel’s CRM feature for easy accessibility. Like customer service, figure out what method works well for you and your business and have fun with it!