High-Value Restaurant Customers Are Attracted by Deals, Discounts & Loyalty Programs

NEWTON, Mass. — Today's frequent restaurant visitors are on the hunt for good deals.

High-spending, high-frequency customers are attracted by deals, discounts and loyalty programs more than other spending groups, according to "The Digital Divide, Aggregators and High-Value Restaurant Customers," a collaboration between Paytronix Systems Inc. and PYMNTS.

These consumers also account for a quarter of restaurant patrons and an outsized share of food aggregator users.

According to report findings, high-spending customers spend an average of more than $40 per purchase, while high-frequency customers buy food from restaurants at least once a week, in the form of dine-in, delivery and pickup orders. These customers account for 44 percent of respondents who ordered delivery from a table-service restaurant via an aggregator in the past three months and 36 percent of those ordering from quick-service restaurants via an aggregator during the same time frame.

Other findings include:

• Deals & Discounts — High-spending, high-frequency users of food aggregators focus more on deals and discounts than other consumers, and are more likely to identify special offers and discounts (47 percent) and access to a restaurant's loyalty program (42 percent) as reasons to order directly from restaurants.
• Demographics — Restaurant customers in younger age brackets are more likely to be both high-spending and high-frequency. Among Generation Z consumers, 42 percent fall into the highest value segment, followed by 35 percent of millennials and bridge millennials. In contrast, just 24 percent of Generation X consumers and 12 percent of baby boomers and seniors are high-spending, high-frequency customers.
• Aggregator Choice — Fifty-eight percent of customers in the high-spending, high-frequency group used DoorDash, also the overall most-used platform, in the past 15 months. However, they were considerably more likely than other customers to have also used the two other leading platforms, Uber Eats and Grubhub, as well as smaller platforms such as Seamless and Postmates.

"Larger shares of high-spending, high-frequency customers care about accessing deals, discounts and loyalty programs when ordering delivery than those in other groups, whether via an aggregator or directly from a restaurant," Paytronix wrote. "This finding underscores the importance of deals and special offers to win and retain the business and loyalty of the highest-value restaurant customer segment."

The full report is available for download here.

Based in Newton, Paytronix is a provider of SaaS customer experience management solutions for restaurants and convenience stores.