My RasoiLast Updated on by My Rasoi
Opening a restaurant is hard, but maintaining one with consistent sales in the times of a pandemic is even harder.
As a restaurant owner, you are always looking for ways to increase the sales, but before doing that you need to understand the most important factors that drive sales.
Let’s take a deep dive to understand the vital factors that propel your restaurant growth and then look at the ways in which you can tackle them.
Factors that drive the restaurant sales
A recent study suggests that restaurant sales factors can be categorized into 5 broad categories.
Let’s list them below according to their significance.
- Price : In this cut-throat business, it’s important to price your items very competitively. So as to reassure the customer that they’re getting their money’s worth.
Be it a fast food store or a fine dine experience, pricing plays a vital role in deciding how much a customer will be spending. - Personal Experience : The main difference between a good and a great restaurant is the customer experience that they provide.
Customer retention is highly necessary to organically grow your sales. Retention that leads to customers bringing in even more customers by word of mouth. - Variety of Menu items : Every customer has a different taste palette, and to cater to that palette it’s imperative to have a variety in your menu.
- Popularity : In urban areas, there’s never a shortage of great restaurants, so making your restaurant stand out is crucial.
- Online Reviews : Making sure you have positive reviews on various online platforms.
10 Ways to increase your restaurant sales
Now that we’ve understood the assignment, let’s see how we can really boost the sales of our restaurant :
1. Switching to a Digital Menu
Curating a menu and then making physical copies of them is a challenge, and then to update it seems impossible.
That’s where a digital menu can help immensely, updating the price and updating items in your menu becomes a breeze. Read about all the benefits of switching to a digital menu.
2. Introducing a Loyalty Program
Even if you have a regular customer, it’s important to make them feel special, giving them an incentive to keep coming back.
Basically, loyalty programs give a customer a small % of their spending back in the form of points. Which they can collect and redeem later. This further helps in building personal relationships with the customers and getting honest feedback.
3. Have an online presence
Online marketing is a dominant force in bringing in new customers in this competitive space. Marketing on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter has shown a surge in new customers coming out to try something new.
Google My Business is a great way to increase the reach and legitimacy of your business. It helps customers to directly call you and look up the directions of your restaurant.
Throwing a themed event for a local festival or an event and putting up ads for it has shown the best results.
Throwing a themed party for local festivals or events and putting up ads for it has shown the best results. For example, a cozy Christmas or new years dinner event, an important sports event for a local bar, a Thanksgiving or Diwali-themed party.
4. Start a Virtual Kitchen
Most people are very well familiar with online delivery, chances are you are already delivering food through an online platform.
But it’s time to level up your delivery game and increase your sales by a sizable margin. Virtual kitchen is a simple method to open a new delivery restaurant into your existing kitchen without any major investment.
The process to set up one is fairly easy. Read about the additional benefits of a virtual kitchen and the process of setting one up step by step.
5. Improve Restaurant table turnover rate
On days that see the most traffic, it’s important that you efficiently manage your table turnover. Customers waiting their turn to dine-in can get frustrated and go to another establishment.
Customers should never get the sense that they need to leave. But some customers can take longer than they need to. The best way to handle this is by streamlining your ordering to the billing process.
Food should be served immediately, food bills should be presented and collected in time. The tables should be corrected promptly for the new customers. The tables should be divided for couples and families accordingly. All of this gives you an edge and helps you with table turnover immensely.
6. Have a strong branding
Having a strong brand name is absolutely necessary for this day and age. From having a distinct logo, catchy tagline to a unique restaurant name.
All of this blends together to give customers a signal that you take pride in what you do and gives them a reason to come to you.
7. Run offers and happy hours
Weekdays can be slow business days for a lot of restaurants. Running offers and happy hours can boost your business these days significantly.
Giving 1+1 on beer and soft drinks has proved to bring in a lot more customers than usual. Similarly, providing assorted food packages for a reasonable price can also bring in customers like students and such who want to eat on a budget.
The experience of your customers can also be enhanced by having live music events which also has a great impact on customer retention and engagement
8. Offline Marketing for restaurant sales
Offline marketing is equally important as online marketing. Distribution of flyers and pamphlets helps bring in customers that are nearby to your restaurant location.
Offline marketing also caters to old people or anyone who doesn’t particularly use social media platforms.
9. Email and SMS marketing for restaurant sales
Email and SMS marketing is a great way to keep your regular customers updated about your restaurant.
It helps in building a personal relationship and trust among the regulars. But it should be done in a moderate amount so as to not annoy them.
10. Communicating with your staff
Having an occasional chat with your employees and staff is a great way to get some honest feedback. Sometimes the best ideas come from in-house talent.
Since your staff is the one dealing with the customers day in and day out, their opinions can have a huge impact. This also builds a great equation between you and your employees ensuring them that their opinions are being heard.
Conclusion
Improvising is the name of the game. All of these steps are not at all hard to implement. Efficiently using some of your existing resources and introducing a few new ones. That’s all it takes to boost your restaurant sales.