In today’s world of cut throat competition, being profitable is not an easy job. Restaurant and café owners have to be very creative with their promotion ideas and have got to employ the right kind of tools to set them up and this can be quite challenging. It may happen that promotions may increase your sales and workloads, but it is not a guarantee that your profits will swell as well. This is the problem we are going to address in this write-up.
Restaurant promotions ideas that can be tried instantly
- Look and feel of your promos
- Don’t waste your money
- Happy hour
- Niche delivery area
- Offer discount on cart value
- Encourage prepayment
- Customer type based promos
- The frequency of your offer
- Using coupon codes for restaurant promotions
Look and feel of your promos
Before getting into the working of the how promotional offers work, let’s first explore how a promotion offer looks and behaves. The promotions that you have created will be displayed in your online menu and shopping cart. It may be displayed right from the beginning or after inserting a promo code.
Don’t waste your money
First of all, you have to be specific about what kind of objectives you want to fulfill while you are running your restaurant promotions. Generic objectives like I want to increase sales wouldn’t work. It is also good if you have several targeted promotions for several segments of your business rather than taking the one size fits all kind of approach. This is so because by taking the latter approach, you are bound to waste money. You face a kind of situation where you waste your incentives or discounts on people who are least concerned about them and who would have ordered anyways or are sensitive to a different ball game of promotions altogether.
Here is how you can craft your promotions to satisfy a particular business need:
Happy hour
This kind of promotion allows you to promote your offer in certain days and time span only. This technique is used often to increase your sales in the unprofitable hours. You can also use the happy hours technique for the opposite effect, by making such a time interval the best time of your business attracting the maximum number of customers in that time span and being in a position to close your kitchen earlier.
Niche delivery area
In this promotion technique, you limit your promotions in a specific delivery zone. This applies when you opt for new areas that are open for delivery, areas in which there is high competition, or areas with a certain specific set of customers. You can also concentrate on giving promotion only for takeaways. It is a good choice when your drivers are overburdened.
Offer discount on cart value
This technique should be employed if you feel your order values are too small and the delivery cost is too high. You should often test for some specific thresholds and find the best limit for yourself. This is a highly effective discount technique.
Encourage prepayment
Most of your customers may prefer paying through cash or card, but they don’t have any incentive to pay online beforehand. However, if you offer some incentive at this stage to encourage your customers to pay online, this could help your margins a lot.
Customer type based promos
In this type of promotion, you get to concentrate only on the specific type of clients, like only on new customers or only on your loyal customers. This is mostly used to increase your conversion ratio and more people visiting your website become your customers. In this process, don’t forget your loyal and regular customers. You should not forget the fact that it is six times cheaper to keep an existing customer than attracting a new one.
Frequency of your offer
In this type of promotion, you can set for how many numbers of times a promo offer can be used by your customers. Under normal circumstances, you will keep this option to be unlimited, but there are cases when you want to ensure that offers are used only once per customer.
Other checks and balances
- You should make sure that your promo offer will not be combined with others on the same order.
- You should also limit the number of times the promotion offer is redeemed.
- You should also use the expiry date feature so that the offer ceases to exist on your desired date.
Using coupon codes for restaurant promotions
Supporting coupon codes is essential for your promotion mechanism. Most common ideas for its implementation include mass distribution of leaflets or other materials or even text messages. The main idea behind this exercise is to get new customers. However, such a kind of activity can also be done for increasing the loyalty of your existing customers. Coupon codes are automatically generated for a specific promotion, but you can also customize this process so that it becomes easier for your customers to insert the coupon codes.
You can also use the technique of putting small promo cards on the table tops to highlight your website address, along with attractive photos of the dishes you want to promote. By using this method, your every dine-in customer will also become your online customer and may order from your website as well. This will surely increase your profitability.
You can also put one of these promo cards inside the bag of every takeaway order. When the customer unwraps the packed food, they may see your promo offer and order from your website the next time, thereby increasing your sales.
Last but not the least, keeping an accurate track of your promotion offers online is a necessity. By tracking your promotional offers through correct and trusted analytics, you can see from the admin panel how many times a particular promotion was used by your customers and redeemed your offer. In this way, you can adjust your promotional offers for best results.