restaurant hospitality
How Anneke, a café owner in Hermanus, runs a loyal regulars programme without an app
WhatsApp campaigns and birthday messages built a personal relationship with regulars that outperformed every loyalty card the café had tried.
Anneke's café in Hermanus is small, seasonal, and lives or dies on regulars. She'd tried punch-cards (got lost), an app (nobody downloaded it), and a printed monthly newsletter (read by maybe ten people). None of it worked.
What worked was WhatsApp. Every customer who orders gets added to ClientPulse with their preferred language and birthday. They get a personal birthday message — written in Anneke's voice, sent automatically — with a small offer for a free cake slice. Once a month, regulars get a campaign: "this week's special bake," with a photo. Reply rates are high because it feels like a friend telling them about the menu, not a marketing email.
The Referrals feature did the unexpected job. Each regular has a unique referral link. When a new customer signs up via that link, the original referrer gets an automatic thank-you WhatsApp from Anneke. Word-of-mouth is the only marketing the café has ever done; ClientPulse just made it trackable.
“I tried every loyalty system on the market. The only one regulars actually used is the one they were already on — WhatsApp.”
Anneke — Café Owner, Hermanus