How can you use referral marketing to promote your restaurant's brunch menu?

1 Why brunch?

Brunch is a popular meal option for many people, especially on weekends and holidays. It offers a chance to enjoy a variety of dishes, from savory to sweet, and to socialize with friends and family. Brunch can also be a profitable segment for your restaurant, as you can charge higher prices than breakfast, and upsell drinks and extras. However, brunch is also a competitive market, and you need to stand out from the crowd and entice customers to choose your restaurant over others.

2 How referral marketing works

Referral marketing works by tapping into the power of word-of-mouth, which is one of the most trusted and influential forms of advertising. According to a study by Nielsen, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know, and 74% identify word-of-mouth as a key factor in their purchase decisions. Referral marketing allows you to leverage the positive experiences and opinions of your customers, and turn them into advocates for your restaurant. By offering them incentives, such as discounts, freebies, or loyalty points, you can motivate them to refer their contacts to your restaurant, and generate more traffic and revenue.

3 How to create a referral program

Creating a referral program for your restaurant requires defining your goals and metrics, choosing incentives and rewards, promoting the program, and tracking and optimizing it. Establish what you want to achieve with the program, such as increasing brunch sales by 20% or attracting 100 new customers per month. Consider what rewards you will offer customers for referring contacts to your restaurant, such as a 10% discount or a free drink or dessert. Promote the program through email marketing, social media, flyers, table tents, and catchy names and calls-to-action for maximum engagement. Finally, track the performance of the referral program with referral software, CRM systems, or spreadsheets in order to analyze the number of referrals, conversion rate, customer satisfaction, and ROI. Test different incentives and promotional channels to see what works best.

5 How to measure the impact of referrals

Referrals can have a positive impact on your restaurant's brunch sales, reputation, and loyalty, so it's important to measure their impact to see how they contribute to your overall goals and metrics. To do this, compare the sales and revenue of your brunch segment before and after implementing your referral program to see how much they have increased. Additionally, calculate the cost per acquisition (CPA) of your referred customers compared to other marketing channels, as well as their lifetime value (LTV) compared to other customers. Furthermore, calculate the referral rate (percentage of customers who refer contacts) and referral ratio (number of referrals per customer) to see how much they have grown. Finally, calculate the net promoter score (NPS) to measure how likely customers are to recommend your restaurant.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?