Collecting consumer data and engaging with customers is our specialty, but what happens when you’re having difficulties getting customers in the door in the first place? Perhaps you’re a frozen yogurt shop who goes through particularly cold winters, but would like to increase awareness surrounding your hot drink products to your existing client base. Below are three tips to help drive more in-store traffic to your locations by utilizing text and loyalty marketing.

1.Automate texts: How often do we get caught up in the business of life, and go months without talking to close friends without even realizing it? Your customers are busy people too, make sure to keep your business top-of-mind by sending them timely offers if they haven’t visited in a while! CityGro’s marketing automations make it easy to schedule a text on a customer’s birthday, taking a lot of the heavy lifting off your hands!

2. Integrate with social media: With the average person spending nearly two hours on social media every day, this is a great opportunity to cross-promote your various marketing channels. Offer incentives for customers ‘checking-in’ or posting from your location. This will kill two birds with one stone — you’ll see foot traffic increase, as well as gain some organic mentions on social media.

Speaking of social media… how are your reviews looking? When looking for a new place to try, I tend to put a lot of weight into Google reviews! Use texts as an easy way to get feedback from your customers. Positive experiences can get posted to social media, while negative comments can be fielded to you to get resolved.

3. Bring on the bouncebacks: Once customers are in the door, keep them coming back by timing communications shortly after their visit. This will help them to get their regular fix of your product, or help them remember to schedule a recurring appointment with your business.

One frozen yogurt company saw customer frequency increase by 22% after scheduling text reminders to go out based on when customers last made a purchase. This helped their less-frequent customers to make purchases on a regular basis!

What other tactics have you tried for driving in-store traffic? We’d love to hear what you’re doing, so we can better know how to bring customers back!