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How To Keep Your Customers Engaged

4 Strategies To Become the go-to café in your local area and within the homes of your customers

Adapting to the changing world of the coffee business is essential to any café’s success. Coffee will make up a fair proportion of your sales, hence as a cafe owner who wants to maximise their sales and create growth, it’s so important that you’re constantly engaging all of your customers i.e. the full spectrum of coffee drinkers.

Your customers come in many different shapes and sizes for example: Black coffee drinkers opposed to milky drinkers. Price sensitive customers versus enviro customers. Customers who are time conscious, grab and go to catch the train as opposed to those that like to have the old chat.

Customer Engagement

At Black Market Roasters, we are a Wholesale Coffee Roaster in Sydney who helps café’s stay on the cusp of the Specialty Coffee revolution. We ensure that the cafe owners we work with are always thinking about stimulating their customers with the latest in trends and origins so that their customers feel loved, listened to and ultimately you become seen as the only go-to-café in your area.

Below are our Black Market Roasters 4-Step Suggestions to Improving Customer Engagement in the Coffee sphere.

  1. Are You Rotating Your Single Origins?

If you feel like your clients are wanting more than just milk based beverages, we highly suggest every café serving over 20kg per week by running a Single Origin Weekly in addition to their usual milk based ‘House’ Blend. This will serve as the base of engagement with those customers that are showing interest in drinking stronger more full flavoured coffee (these are your die hard customers, your coffee influencers, the people who know their coffee and influence others). 

Often a House Blend isn’t the best-served black, so a vibrant, light, aromatic single origin coffee that rotates weekly can drastically help position your café among the best in Australia.

It’s so easy to do, whats stopping you from running a little experiment and trying it for a month?

  1. Point of Sale Material

To show your customers how much you care and think about the quality and sourcing of your coffee, we suggest having a series of small informational leaflets stating a little about the coffee you are serving. Not too much information to confuse the customer, but just enough to engage them and to get them thinking about how much you care about quality coffee.

When a customer knows the story behind the coffee they’re drinking, it adds immense value and gives them something to share out to their friends across social networks and in person (it can become your guerrilla marketing and referral superhero strategy!).

  1. Free Taste Samples

It’s so easy, you can give out free taste samples of your latest coffee using either a quick ‘ristretto’ (a short espresso) or a cold drip coffee sample, allowing the customer to try something new, engage with the staff and showcase the quality of your coffee. One thing is for certain, everyone enjoys good value and sometimes a little free stuff, and with such a tiny cost, your sure to impress your customers and see a positive return!

  1. Retail Coffee Bean Packs

While many café’s do this, very few do it well. Having packs of coffee ready to go allows customers to touch and feel the beans and then transport it to their homes, increasing your brand retention with them. Imagine, every morning your customer wakes up to make their coffee in the comfor of their home, then they see your packaging, your brand and associate it with a fine cup of coffee to start the day.

We suggest putting your own branding on it rather than the roasters as it increases your goodwill and ensures you have time during service to help customers make the right choice for the way they drink it at home as well as any concerns they have with their machine. Become the go-to café within the homes of your customers, and the go to for all coffee related information and advice in your area.

What have you tried that works, or doesn’t work?

We love to share our experience in the hope to help others who we’re facing the same challenges as us when we we’re just starting out and struglling as a cafe owner. 

Give us your opinion in the comments below.