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It’s a tough time and you’re trying to attract customers to spend their money in your venue – promotions are important to everybody. Times are tight and everyone is feeling the crunch. Many are doing promotions, let talk about a variety of ideas of how you do promotions and how to track their success.
Promotions are key to keep existing customers and attract new ones. There are lots and lots of promotions that you can do, of course – Choosing the right kind of promotions, the right targets or timing could be harder than it sounds. Here a few examples will be discussed and what they could cover.
Execution, visibility
Once you actually decide to try a promotion out, you need to be sure that it is offered under the conditions that you have set (qualifying customers, times and days it is offered). If you have a POS that requires you to make another button for the promotion item or that allows for promotions to be turned on and off, you are relying entirely on your staff to maintain that promotion within the set parameters, and unfortunately, that is rarely accurate and may even create losses for you that you shouldn’t have (staff may give the price to someone outside of the scheduled day or time because they like them – that’s effectively a gift out of your pocket).
Automation, using a Point of Sales system
Ideally, you want a POS that allows for promotions to operate automatically based on the parameters that are set – only available (and 100% available) during the days and times scheduled. Not staff choice – your choice.
Monitor the promotions
Once a promotion is running, the ability to see how much business it is generating, the costs and margins. Those numbers allow to determine if the promotion is actually successful, and to eliminate those that are not, retain or expand those that work. Key to success is to have a full insights on these numbers.
Track to succeed
Just as important as what promotions you do is tracking them, finding out how successful they are – because you don’t want to be simply giving away food and beverage for no corresponding increase in volume or profit. Promotions take work to create, you need to know who your customers are, what works in general, when your business needs more traffic, what are your most popular items, what percentage of your clientele are regulars and what your margins are. You also need to know how your promotions impact those margins.
Examples
- Membership/VIP discounts
- Giveaways and contests (Quiz night is a popular one, also Killer Pool, but there are certainly others)
- Promotions related to events (holidays, sporting events, day of the week)
- Volume offering (buy 1 get 1, but 5 get 1)
- Bundles (buckets of beer, entree & a pint, pasta dinner for 2 with wine)
- Get in the door specials (discount on snacks or one popular beer, ladies night)
- Slow time specials (happy hours, lunchtime specials)
- Pre-selling – (special deals on purchases made up front, which the customer than collects as they wish over a time period)
- Encourage your space to be used as work space (this was a definite no-go just 6 months ago, but now – having that person on their computer at a table for hours who eat some snacks and have a couple of coffees is certainly better than having that table empty)
- Link promotions to other restaurants/bars (yes, find competitors that you can work with – neither of you will have that customer 100% of the time, but together you might come closer than alone).
- Have one dish that is the cheapest (it will get you more sales of the items that are second cheapest)
- Better photos equal better sales (mouth-watering photos trigger chemical responses in the brain – take advantage of that) – and the best photos should be your best margin items (and maybe the only photos).
- Make sure your Google Maps listing is accurate and current
- Use social media – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest – be visible and findable
- If someone finds you on their phone, can they get to you?
- Interact with customers (don’t overdo it, but do engage).
- Delivery service! Yours or a service or multiple services – but make your food available for pickup and delivery.
- If your menu is online? Make sure it is readable on a mobile phone.
- If you seat customers? Start with the seats near the windows (attracts more customers)
- Get customers to check-in on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – a promo to encourage that is certainly possible.
- Link promotions to gathering data that you can use to market to those customers.
- Business card giveaways (collect cards in a bowl, give away a free meal once a month).
- Highlight the items you want to encourage people to buy on your menu.
- Host parties and events (local clubs, organizations, whatever is around).
- Fairly new data suggests that not using currency symbols on the menu will help your sales.
- Have sharable items on the menu (snack platters, pasta for two, etc.)
- Track your regulars’ buying habits and reward them
- Live Music
- Offer samples (once in a while, ask the customer’s opinion)
- Use geolocation (a potential customer in your area needs to find you if they look for “restaurants near me”)
- Offer exclusives for select groups (retirees, vets, ladies, firefighters) on certain days
- Provide a special deal for someone who brings a new customer to your venue