The restaurant business is highly competitive, so maintaining your restaurant’s sales amidst rapidly changing trends and fierce competition can be a challenge.
Also, customers have no lack of choice when choosing a restaurant for dining out or ordering in.
Moreover, with a hike in COVID-19, it has become more important than ever for restaurant owners worldwide to plan strategies that help attract more customers and increase overall sales to their business.
Before the pandemic, restaurants’ digital orders increased by 23% annually, yet this number skyrocketed in 2021.
To help you maximize profits by increasing your restaurant sales, here are seven ideas you can try.
Including many services helps to grow restaurant sales
Restaurant takeout and delivery services have been rising steadily in popularity and are essential to increasing sales in the current scenario.
As we all know, there are restrictions on restaurants due to the covid-19, which limits dine-in services in many states. So, if you diversify your services to include delivery, takeout, and pick up, you can help to maximize your sales.
If you haven’t chalked out a plan yet, here are 4 valuable tips:
- Create a separate menu for delivery and takeout services. Choose items that can quickly be delivered and are prepared in no time. Third, avoid food that could melt during transit.
- Provide curbside pickup services to your customers and train your staff on the proper procedures for handling orders and accepting payment.
- Start delivery services with the available third-party services. It helps your customers to enjoy your food when they can’t come to you.
- Website for online ordering.Create and update your restaurant website to provide online ordering for delivery, takeout, and drive-thru service. A lot of people prefer to order online with a website or app instead of by making a phone call.A survey shows that 40% of online transactions are made using a phone. So, automate the entire process by accepting online payments.
Mobile Friendly Website
It is no surprise that 62% of users access the web using their mobile devices. So no matter how much effort you put into your business’s website, if it’s not mobile or tablet friendly, the majority of your buyers will bounce right off the page.
Follow these ideas to increase your mobile presence;
- To help your customers find your restaurant, list your business on Google My Business with your address, phone number, hours, and pictures of your location.
- To maintain an active online presence, create social media accounts for your business.
Attract More Customers to Your Restaurant
That’s quite a good deal if you already know the importance of first impressions. Making a little extra effort to give your new customers a great first experience goes a long way towards turning them into regular and loyal customers.
Take these 3 steps to reach your new customers and stay in touch by creating a personal connection with them.
- Participate in restaurant week, as it is celebrated in New York and other states across the US. The basic idea of participating is to promote special discounted offers that are valid throughout this “restaurant week.” This is an ideal way to reach your new customers because food voucher discounts encourage people to try your food.
- Use paid marketing tactics to attract new customers. Having a solid presence on social media costs nothing but your time. You can encourage customers to write reviewsof their experience dining in your restaurant.
- Start giving away coupons that encourage customers to come back. Alternatively, you can gift your new customers a free dessert or beverage with their first purchase.
Plan Customer Retention Strategies
Word of mouth is still considered one of the best ways to promote your food business. In these cases, you can think of your regular and loyal customers for free advertising.
Many of us don’t trust paid ads, but we trust our friend’s recommendation of a favorite restaurant.
There are 3 techniques to keep your best customers coming back time and time again.
- Develop a customer loyalty program by offering a membership card.There are many ways you can set up your loyalty program, but membership cards track each time a customer visits a restaurant.
- Host a charity event for your local community.Choose a day where you donate 5% of your profits to a charity. It’s a great way to give back to the community, and your customers will appreciate the extra effort.
- Events & Parties.Offering space for the events and parties helps you build a relationship with the community. Booking live music concerts is another excellent way to get your customers’ attention and make them visit your restaurant regularly.
Train Your Staff on Upselling Techniques
A skilled worker can increase your restaurant’s sales with effective communication. Upselling tempts them into ordering more than they may have originally intended. When teaching your servers these techniques, there are 3 important upselling tips to keep in mind.
- The best opportunity to upsell comes shortly after your customers are seated; encourage your servers to describe your special drinks on the menu before drink orders are taken. Also, don’t forget to point out creative cocktails, as it may entice a customer to try once, even if they thought of having plain water.
- Use the same technique as you did with the beverages. Your staff can simply start describing “Special Food items” on the menu to help customers think about trying one of those meals.
- When everyone is finished with their meal, suggest your customers try after-dinner drinks or a dessert. Again, naming off a few dinner drinks options may tempt your customers to try one.
Table Turnover Rate
It is obvious that if you sell more food, the more money you make. And to sell more food is to serve more people. So, here comes the table turnover rate.
As a restaurant owner, you can’t control how long guests take to eat their meal, so 5 tricks can maximize your service’s efficiency.
- Maintain organized seating in your restaurant.Things like reservations and hostess stands are pretty standard seating systems restaurants use to know how many guests to manage and expect guests’ flow through the door.
- Keep your staff on schedule.The most important thing is to make sure that your restaurant has enough employees to cover all the guests in your dining room. Next, train your staff to take drink orders on time and bring out the check promptly at the end of the serving.
- Use of technology. Some restaurants use mobile POS systems to eliminate the need for staff to walk back and forth to process credit cards.
- Dining room Setup.Some of the dining rooms in restaurants are simply set up in such a way to make people want to linger. There are multiple tricks your business can use when arranging your furniture that can encourage people to move along. Moreover, seating small groups at smaller tables can help ensure that you have ample space when more people arrive.
- Keep your menu more compact.The idea is to limit the number of food items on your menu. It will help you simplify everything and save the amount of time people spend deciding on their meal.
Combo Meals & Deals
Combo deals are also a great way to win more customers. The idea is to select your top-selling food items and pair them with a popular drink or beverage. For example, in popular restaurant chains, they pair the burgers with french fries and a cold drink. But, of course, the best example is McDonald’s.
Bottom Line
The most important part of running your successful restaurant business is assessing and reassessing how things are working.
Restaurant owners are constantly looking for ways to improve processes and increase their sales and orders. Hence, when it comes to finding ways to increase sales in your restaurant, there are six most important factors to consider.
- Diversify your services
- Build strong Digital Presence
- Attract More Customers
- Customer Retention Strategies
- Upselling Techniques
- Table Turnover rates
- Combo meals and deals
Many of the basic sale principles remain the same across all types of restaurant establishments, so if you follow these ideas, you’ll be on the road to success in no time.
If you have any other innovative ideas to 10X a restaurant’s sales, let us know in the comment section.
