Maintaining your restaurant’s sales amidst fierce competition and rapidly changing trends can be a challenge. A key to success is finding the balance between acquiring new customers vs. retaining existing customers. With any new goal, you can best approach this by creating a plan and breaking it down into actionable steps. To help you reach the goal of increasing your restaurant sales, we’ve identified six restaurant improvement ideas you can try:
1. Diversify Your Services
Restaurant delivery and takeout services have been rising steadily in popularity and are essential to maintaining your sales in the current climate. Restrictions on restaurants due to the coronavirus pandemic are limiting dine-in services in many states. By diversifying your services to include takeout, delivery, and curbside pickup, you can help to increase your sales and weather this crisis. If you haven’t made plans to offer these services yet, here are some tips:
1. Create a takeout and delivery menu. Create a separate menu for takeout and delivery only and make it a simplified version of your dine-in menu. Choose items that are easy to prepare and travel well. Avoid delicate items that could fall apart or melt during transit.
2. Provide curbside pickup. For the quickest takeout service, you can provide curbside pickup to your customers. If you have a parking lot, reserve a couple of spaces near your entrance. Train your staff on the proper procedures for handling curbside orders and accepting payment.
3. Implement delivery services. If you’ve been thinking about setting up delivery services for your restaurant, now is the perfect time. You don’t even need your own delivery fleet thanks to the availability of reliable third party delivery services like Grub hub and Postmates. When your customers can’t come to you, you can adapt by bringing your services to their homes.
4. Optimize your drive-thru window. If you already have a drive-thru window, keep the area stocked with the items you need to serve customers quickly. Napkins, plastic cutlery, and condiments should be kept in plain sight so they are never forgotten. Test out your speakers to make sure they are working at the appropriate level and customers can hear you clearly. You can also work with your drive-thru team to set expectations about how long it should take orders to be completed.
5. Institute online ordering. Update your restaurant website to provide online ordering for takeout, delivery, and drive-thru service. Many customers find it easier to order online instead of by phone because they can place orders instantly at any time they choose. You can expedite the entire process by also accepting online payment.
2. Enhance Your Mobile Presence
It’s no secret that more and more people access the web primarily on their mobile devices. No matter how much time you put into your business’s website, if it’s not optimized for phones and tablets, the majority of your customers will bounce right off the page. Make sure you’re website looks great and functions properly on tablets, phones, and desktops alike. Try these tips to increase your mobile presence:
1. List your business on Google My Business. If you don’t have a website for your restaurant, the easiest thing you can do to help customers find your business is to create a Google My Business (GMB) listing with your address, hours of operation, phone number, and pictures of your location. GMB listings also allow your customers to review your restaurant and post photos of your food dishes online.
2. Create social media accounts. Similarly, try setting up social media accounts for your business and maintain an active online presence. If you don’t have time to monitor messages coming through your social networks, put one of your managers in charge of replying to inquiries.
3. Make announcements through social media. Another great thing about having a business account for social media is that you can make announcements for any events you may be hosting. You can use it to alert customers if your business is closed unexpectedly for a power outage or other unforeseen reason. Of course it’s also a perfect way to connect with your community and humanize your brand. Overall, you can use social media as a tool to accomplish many of the customer retention strategies mentioned above.
3. Attract New Customers to Your Restaurant
You probably know the importance of first impressions. A regular customer is more likely to forgive a sub-par experience than a brand new customer. But, even more common than a bad restaurant experience is a forgettable one. Making just a little extra effort to give your guests a great first experience goes a long way towards turning them into loyal customers. Take steps to stay in touch and create a personal connection with them.
Three Ways to Attract New Customers to Your Restaurant
You know that reaching new customers is important, but now the question is how to reach them. Below are a few common techniques you can use:
1. Participate in your city’s restaurant week. Restaurant week got its start in New York as a way to celebrate restaurants in the area. While every city has its own take on this tradition, the basic idea is that the city chooses one week out of the year to showcase their restaurants, and local restaurant owners can choose if they’d like to participate. Participating restaurants promote special discounted offers that are valid throughout the week. This is a great way to reach new customers because offering discounts encourages people to try your food.
If you want to learn more about how to get involved in this type of event, check out our blog on restaurant week.
2. Use marketing techniques to attract new customers. Of course, there are many traditional marketing tactics you can turn to, but ad placements can cost a lot of money. Having a strong social media presence, however, costs nothing but your time. If you want to put some money towards paid social media advertising, it can be an affordable alternative to purchasing ads in newspapers. You can even encourage customers to write reviews of their experience dining with you, which will add to your restaurant marketing efforts.
Find more techniques for reaching new customers in our article on social media marketing for restaurants.
3. Develop a first-time customer program. This usually involves giving away coupons that encourage customers to come back. Alternatively, you can give your new customers a free appetizer, dessert, or beverage with the purchase of an entree. This is a great way of showing your customers how much you appreciate their business, and it can help set your business apart from the competition.
4. Use Customer Retention Strategies to Increase Customer Loyalty
In many cases, you can think of your loyal customers as free advertising. Word of mouth is one of the best ways any business will gain traction. People generally don’t trust paid ads, but they do trust their friend’s recommendation of a favorite place to eat. This means that your loyal customers are invaluable to the success of your business, and they should be treated as such.
Three Ways to Retain Customers
There are a few techniques many successful restaurants use to keep their best customers coming back time and time again:
1. Develop a customer loyalty program. There are a lot of ways you can set up your loyalty program, but one of the most common is to create a membership card that tracks each time a customer visits your restaurant, so they can work towards earning a free item of your choosing. Offering free drinks and desserts is often a good choice because they’re less expensive than an entree, but they will still make your guests feel appreciated. You can set up a card that tracks points in your POS system or a punch card that gets a new hole each time the customer visits.
2. Get involved in the local community. Hosting a charity event for a cause you care about is a great way to give back to the community and customers will notice the extra effort. For example, choose a day where you donate 10% of your profits to a charity. You can advertise the event in advance so that customers will know to dine in your restaurant that day if they’d like to contribute to the cause. Hosting cooking classes, beer tastings, or anything that educates customers about your product is another great way to help the local community feel invested in your brand.
3. Organize events. Something as simple as offering a space for community events, like company parties, can go a long way towards building a relationship with the community. Hosting weekly trivia encourages customers to come out to your bar on a weeknight. Booking live music is another great way to get customers to visit your business more regularly. Overall, organizing games or music helps people feel relaxed in your establishment and encourages them to stay longer and purchase more from your menu.
5. Train Your Servers on Upselling Techniques
A skilled server will be able to increase your restaurant’s sales with simple conversation. Effective upselling ultimately leaves the customer in control of their decision and doesn’t make them feel pressured to buy more. Rather, it will plant the seed that tempts them into ordering more than they may have originally intended. When it comes to teaching your staff these techniques, there are three main upselling tips to keep in mind:
1. Describe a menu item. The first opportunity to upsell comes shortly after guests are seated. Before drink orders are taken, encourage your servers to describe their favorite specialty drinks on the menu. Pointing out creative cocktails may entice a customer enough to try one, even if they had originally thought of having just water.
2. Assume your guests will want an entree. You can use the same technique as you did with the drinks. Servers can simply start describing items on the menu as a way to help customers think about trying one of those options. Another popular opportunity for upselling is to ask customers if they’d like to include an extra side with their meal. But if you charge extra for that side, be sure to mention it, so your guests aren’t confused when they get the bill.
3. Suggest more things to try. When everyone is finished with their entree, suggest that they try a dessert or after-dinner drinks. Again, naming off a few dessert options may tempt your customers to try one.
There’s even more opportunity to upsell if your server is speaking with a first-time customer because they will be eager to learn about your menu items. They’re also more likely to be interested in trying the server’s suggestions than a patron who has dined at your establishment many times.
6. Maximize Your Table Turnover Rate
The more food you sell, the more money you make, and the obvious way to sell more food is to serve more people. This is where table turnover comes into play. While you can’t control how long guests take to eat their meal, there are a few tricks that can increase the efficiency of your service. Here are a few things to try:
1. Have an organized seating system. Things like hostess stands and reservations are pretty common seating systems restaurants use to know how many guests to expect and manage the flow of guests coming through the door.
2. Keep your serving staff on schedule. Make sure that your restaurant has enough employees to cover all the guests in your dining room and train your staff take drink orders in a timely manner and bring out the check promptly at the end of the meal.
3. Use technology to your advantage. Some restaurants will use mobile POS systems to eliminate the need for servers to walk back and forth to the register to process credit cards.
4. Update your dining room. Some dining rooms are simply set up in such a way to make people want to linger. There are a few tricks your business can use when arranging your furniture that can encourage patrons to move along. Additionally, seating small parties at smaller tables can help ensure that you have ample space when larger parties arrive.
5. Make your menu more compact. Limiting the amount of items on your menu simplifies everything from the amount of time customers spend deciding on their meal to the amount of time your chef will take to prepare each dish.
If slow turnaround is an issue at your restaurant, try out a few different techniques to see if there’s a way you can improve the pace of your dining room.
Master the art of flipping tables with additional insight from our article on maximizing table turnover.
An important part of running any successful business is assessing and reassessing the way things are running. Restaurant owners are constantly thinking of ways to improve processes and increase efficiency. When it comes to finding ways of increasing sales in your restaurant, there are many factors to take into account. The good news is that many of the basic principles remain the same across all types of dining establishments, so if you follow the basic checklist of attracting new customers while thinking of ways to retain customers, and fill in those basic steps with practical business techniques and restaurant marketing, you’ll be on the road to success in no time.
