How to Drive Repeat Visits to Your Canadian Restaurant

Getting customers to visit you restaurant more than once can be challenging. However, building a loyal customer base is essential to ensuring that your restaurant’s profitability increases. Because ultimately, you want visitors to tell others of their positive experiences, and your restaurant to remain competitive.

If you're wondering how to increase repeat restaurant customers, here are nine suggestions for how you could do it.

1. Promote exceptional customer service

Negative hospitality experiences can resonate more powerfully than positive ones. That's why every member of your front-of-house staff must offer the best service to ensure your customers return to your restaurant again and again.

In practical terms, this means training your staff to anticipate customers’ needs before they are asked, such as refilling water glasses, attending customers promptly when they are ready to order, and ensuring that your customers are served in a timely manner.

When something goes wrong with service, such as a delay in serving customers’ meals due to a particularly busy kitchen or an improperly cooked dish, offer customers something to smooth things over. This could include replacing or providing reimbursement for a particular dish, offering an appetizer or dessert on-the-house, and/or offering a discount on a future visit to your restaurant.

2. Hire the right front-of-house staff

Having outgoing, passionate people in your front-of-house is crucial to ensuring that customers are engaged and come away with positive experiences, making them want to return to your restaurant in the future.

Image source: Will Guidara Instagram

When training your staff, encourage them to remember customers’ names and their regular orders. Taking special note of birthdays, anniversaries, and other special occasions is beneficial as well; you may want to encourage servers to offer a complimentary dessert or train servers to let the kitchen know to write “Happy Birthday” or “Happy Anniversary” on a plate when plating a dessert

3. Implement a restaurant loyalty program

A restaurant loyalty program is a great way to reward customers for visiting your restaurant. A popular option is to offer customers a physical card where they can collect stamps for each time they visit your restaurant. Then, once they have collected enough stamps, they can receive rewards.

Another possibility is a digitized points program, where customers can collect points for each visit, and then once they collect a specified number, they can apply those points towards their order. 

While implementing a loyalty program may feel like a hassle, research has shown that 77% of consumers stay loyal to brands with loyalty programs, so it pays dividends when aiming for repeat restaurant visitors. Plus, loyalty programs have been linked to customers spending a higher amount.

Pro Tip - Toast's integrated, customisable loyalty programme helps you retain valuable guests and encourage repeat visits. Find out more here

4. Utilize social media

Social media is an integral restaurant marketing tool. While promoting your restaurant through social media can help new people find your restaurant, it can also remind existing customers what you have to offer. 

Engage with your customers through platforms like TikTok, Instagram or Facebook, and share posts about your menu and upcoming events.

5. Make sure your opening hours are consistent

Consistency keeps customers coming back. To avoid frustration and help customers plan their return visit to you restaurant, keep them in the loop when opening times change.

Take a look at how 2 Doors Down in Halifax use Instagram to simply and efficiently inform customers of their summer hours:

Image source: 2 Doors Down Instagram

Finally, make sure that your hours listed in online forums like Google, Facebook, or your website match the hours you are actually opening and closing. And, if you do need to close your restaurant on a whim, do your best to inform customers via email or social media.

6. Create a diverse and interesting menu

Diversifying your menu to include local or seasonal ingredients or collaborations with other chefs, brands or restaurants will excite guests to return to your restaurant.

To get started, consider your restaurants unique selling point and how you could use this to jump on any food trends that people are raving about on social media and begin reaching out to any brands that you might want to work with.

7. Create an email list

Creating an email list containing customer email addresses will allow you to keep in touch with them long after they've visited your restaurant.

Use email lists to encourage guest engagement and repeat visits by:

• Targeting lapsed customers: If a customer hasn’t returned to your restaurant for a while, you can send out emails to tell the you miss them. These emails can include updates on your restaurant, information about special events or coupons for money off of their next meal.

• Providing personalised special offers: If you keep records of potential customers’ birthday's or other anniversaries, you can make them feel like VIP's by emailing them with special offers to celebrate personal occasions at your restaurant.

• Sending out a newsletter: Sending out a monthly newsletter to customers via email is an excellent way to communicate new menu items, ticketed events you will be holding, or features on staff members like your sommelier, kitchen staff, or front-of-house staff.

• Promote deals for specific days of the week: Holding a wing night? Email previous customers with a link to make a reservation and a personalised special offer.

Creating emails or newsletters can take some time to create, so you might want to enlist the help of AI applications like Chat GPT to help you along the way.

Bare in mind there are also email marketing tools for restaurants that can quickly help you set up campaigns and generate sales.

8. Allow customers to order online for pickup or delivery

According to Toast consumer research, 48.5% of consumers in Canada dine out or order delivery food at least once a week. So, increasing the ways customers can order food at your restaurant is a sure-fire way to entice people to visit or order from your restaurant more often.

For that reason, you should invest in a quality online ordering system to ensure that customers can order food easily and schedule their time for pickup or delivery. You may decide that you would like to hire your own delivery staff or partner with your local food delivery service. Online ordering systems like Toast even integrate with your restaurants POS.

9. Put on special events or live entertainment

Turn your restaurant into a multi-dimensional space by hosting events or entertainment like live music, standup comedy, or poetry nights.

Befikre in Toronto are experts at this concept. Head over to their Instagram to see how they bring the element of entertainment to Indian dining, with Bollywood-themed dance parties and live bands:

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A post shared by Befikre | Bar + Indian Kitchen (@befikresocial)

Concluding thoughts

While these customer retention strategies for restaurants aren’t all one size fits all, there are some you will undoubtedly find that a few will work well for you as part of your marketing strategy.

Whether you choose to promote your restaurant through social media, diversify your menu, provide discounts and offers to customers, create a loyalty program, or schedule special events or entertainment, these strategies will be a significant step towards your goal of turning one-time visitors into repeat customers.