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Your restaurant is amazing, and your customers know it. But wouldn’t you like more customers to know?
Sure, we all look for that. That is why the search to grow your business is constant based on promotions and specialties in your restaurant.
Here are two ways to delight your guests at the same time as getting more customers with promotions.
A limited-time offer gives you the opportunity to experience new things on the menu without having to commit to it for long, giving you freedom and some comfort.
Specials are an opportunity to have fun with new dishes, show off seasonal specials, or make a difference in your community.
According to Technomic, 43% of consumers rate highly the fact that restaurants frequently offer new or seasonal dishes on their menus. That same study says that 43% are willing to pay more for this specialty for a limited time.
We show you 3 examples of restaurant specialties
One specialty per season
As soon as the leaves begin to fall from the trees in an ocher hue, the guys at Starbucks start offering a drink that is on the minds of all their customers: the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte.
The drink is only sold during the fall and began to be sold in 2003: in 2015 they made 100 million only selling this drink. Its launch in Spain even made the news.
Create something special and exclusive by season.
Support a good cause
Try to contribute something good to your community. In 2016, Subway restaurants across Canada donated 303.030 meals to Food Banks Canada through their ‘National Sandwich Day’ offering.
It was simple: One day when customers were buying a particular sandwich with a drink, Subway donated the full equivalent of the purchase to charity, in this case Food Banks Canada.
Do the same: see how useful a donation of your food to local food banks or a donation in kind or cash could be.
Choose a day of the week and make an offer for those who have donated money. As simple as that.
You create a reputation and also help your community.
New York’s “Chef’s Table” has removed the menu. We are not talking about just any restaurant, it is very prestigious and a table there costs € 300. They realized that by exciting their customers every morning, and maintaining only a fixed theme, they earned more than with the predictability of the menus.
You may not be able to do it in your restaurant, but you can leave a section to the choice of your trusted chef. Do not settle for the classic special of the day, that method is used by everyone, be different.
2. Loyalty program for discounts
Howard Schneider, an expert in loyalty marketing, says that “customers remember their experience with a brand, long after they have forgotten a discount,” something that every restaurateur should engrave on their skin.
Loyalty programs are excellent friends at your restaurant: your most loyal customers visit you often and may read you regularly on social media or email, or by sharing photos of their stay at your restaurant on their social media.
Do not settle for the classic loyalty cards, modernize to a more complex level and hire a customer loyalty program, which simplify the task for your employees and customers and have at the same time a variety of rewards and ways to obtain them.
Domino’s Pizza created in the United States a very simple program: 10 points for every $ 10 spent, when you are 60, you have a free medium pizza with two ingredients. We have seen them in McDonald’s and supermarkets like Día or El Corte Inglés.
They don’t cost a fortune and they allow you to gamify your clients. The most valuable customer is not the one who consumes the most, but the one who does not abandon you, and this is one way to retain them. A company specialized in Spain is Disiarte
Nothing more dreamed than a influencer visit your restaurant, upload a photograph of your food to Instagram, mention your restaurant, and that it reaches hundreds of thousands of views in a couple of days.
Since you cannot, nor should you, wait for a influencer arrives at your restaurant, the best thing is to turn every customer into a influencerIt doesn’t matter if they have 10 followers or a hundred thousand, use our love for food and photography to get known for free.
Here are some ideas:
- Reward Swarm or Foursquare’s “biggest” with free dinner
- Place on a mural the best photograph on Instagram
- Run contests on the main social networks, especially live
- Offer discounts to those who make reservations through social networks or your website