How to Increase Restaurant Sales: 10 Simple Tips & Secrets
Niki Dealey
Artificial Intelligence CERTIFIED Consultant, AI Certified Data Science & Implementation Consultant, Certified Conversion Strategist for Digital Marketing.
Do you want to learn how to increase restaurant sales fast and drive a nice profit to fuel your bank account?
The answer’s pretty simple, and I bet you already know it: it all comes down to?satisfying your clients’ wants and needs.
They are the ones who have the credit cards that pay for your services. However, you can be in control of?what they see and believe?by influencing and shaping their shopping mindset – all to your benefit.
The solution to increasing restaurant sales is straightforward: fulfill your customers’ wishes. You’ll draw them to your restaurant like a moth to a flame. Don’t do it, and that’ll be like the kiss of death for your business.
If your clients are?online, that’s where you should be. Because nowadays, going digital is?the core secret of running a successful business. So, let’s see how you can do just that and increase restaurant sales.
1. Offer Your Clients the Chance to Place Food Orders Online
Using an online ordering system is truly a game-changer in the restaurant business. And that’s because it makes online food ordering as easy as apple pie. Or as easy as a Sunday morning. Your call.
Implementing an ordering system can be done within mere minutes. And using it can turn into a?win-win situation?for both you and your customers.
However, you have to be careful what?online ordering system provider?you choose to go with since most of them can end up ripping you off. And that’s because they can retain as much as a?two-digit commission per every order?processed through their system.
2. Provide Them with An Instant Table Reservation System
We live in an accelerating world, where we’re always finding ourselves needing to be somewhere at a particular hour.
We need to go to work in the morning, we need to go to the gym, we need to go to bed early, and so on.
And we simply can’t afford the luxury of wasting our time on trivial things. So you see, trying to book a table can often be unpleasant for your clients.
Most of the time, they avoid doing it and just show up at your restaurant, hoping they’ll find an open table.
But why not save your clients the disappointment they’ll face every time you tell them that you don’t have a table for them?
The easiest – and probably fastest – way to do that AND increase restaurant sales is by adding a “Table Reservation” feature to your restaurant website.
This will help your customers check the availability of your restaurant tables and reserve one for themselves instead of calling your landline, waiting on the line and asking you to book them a table.
3. Use Menu Psychology to Your Advantage
Menu engineering?refers to the use of menu psychology to increase restaurant sales. You may believe that this will have you banging your head against a brick wall. But that’s far from it.
You can use a?simple menu template?that “tricks” your customers into buying more food items that they would usually order over the phone.
You know the saying, “I am on a seafood diet. I see food, and I eat it.” It’s funny, yet it is true. People are stimulated into taking action by what they see.
So placing images of your most expensive foods in the top right corner (the place we look to first on a web page or a menu) will make them pop and stick in your customers’ minds.
For example, if a picture of one of your desserts is the first thing hungry customers see, it will enhance their visual appetite.
Most of them are definitely on the see-food diet. And the more food images they see, the more they’ll want to order.
So they will not only order what they initially wanted to, but chances are they’ll also have some dessert and appetizers alongside their desired main course.
4. Make Them an Offer They Can’t Refuse
We all have a hard time turning down a good discount or promotion. It’s written in our DNA code. So the better your offer, the more you’ll skyrocket your chances of attracting different types of customers, including the?“bargain seekers.”
5. Use SEO to Help Your Website Rank High on Google
Each restaurant has its own specific cuisine that it caters to. For example, suppose you have an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side in NY. In that case, you want those keywords inserted into your website content.
When your customers go online and enter those keywords in the Google search bar, they usually order from the first restaurants that pop up in search results. And you need to be there if you want to increase restaurant sales.
This will help you eliminate that cloak of invisibility and provide your restaurant with plenty of?customer visibility. Using keywords is much like leaving breadcrumbs for your clients so that they’ll know where to come looking for you.
The bigger the crumbs, the faster they’ll get to you.
Without a shadow of a doubt, being online is a clear shortcut towards:
6. Entertain and Engage Your Guests for a Unique Experience
Main restaurants in your city offer great food at reasonable prices. What makes you stand out from your competitors?
Giving people a unique experience creates positive memories that will encourage customers to come back often.
When possible, engage all five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch).
There’s a lot of remarkable research that you can use to influence how customers experience your restaurant.
Use tinted glasses to increase restaurant sales
Nicolas Guéguen conducted a fun?experiment?to see how glass color would affect how people perceive their beverages. He used blue, green, yellow, and red glasses to serve drinks to students.
All of the drinks were the same temperature. However, the students believed that?beverages served in blue glasses were cooler and more refreshing.
You can use this knowledge in a couple of ways. Suppose you want customers to identify your restaurant as a place with great drinks. In that case, you can serve beverages in blue glasses.
If you want to learn how to increase restaurant sales without advertising, you could serve drinks in red or yellow glasses. That way, customers will order more drinks to quench their thirst.
It’s a straightforward strategy, but it’s also one of the most profitable restaurant ideas.
Pump up the volume: loud music encourages customers to drink beer faster
A group of French researchers?varied the loudness of music in a bar?to see how it affected beverage consumption. They found that loud music encouraged customers to drink beer faster.
When the researchers turned off the jukebox, customers only bought?2.5 beers per hour. However, when the music volume was loud, customers bought an average of?4 beers per hour!
The more you influence your customers’ sensory experiences, the more control you have over whether you can increase restaurant sales.
It’s important to remember that people have at least three stages of experience:
If you can create pre-, in-, and post- experiences that customers love, you will immediately see how to increase restaurant sales without spending any money on advertising.
7. Use Psychology to Increase Restaurant Sales
Are you using psychology as part of your restaurant business plan?
Understanding how people think and feel is essential to learning how to grow a restaurant business and improve restaurant operations.
领英推荐
When you tap into underlying human needs, you can develop strategies to increase sales in your restaurant. Ideally, this will help you find out how to attract customers to your restaurant and satisfy them to keep coming back.
Menu psychology is one of the main strategies you can employ. Learn the most profitable restaurant?menu pricing methods?and how?menu writing?can influence your customers to order more.
Use comfort to your advantage
Comfort food evokes thoughts and feelings of enjoying family meals at home. You can go deeper than that, though, to give your customers even more comforts to make them love your restaurant.
When done right, even the slowest restaurant months of the year won’t hurt your business.
You can add comfort to your restaurant by:
The more of these comforts you can give customers, the more business you’ll attract.
Tap into the need for safety to increase restaurant sales
Safety also plays an essential role in developing profitable restaurant ideas.
The human brain is designed to seek safety. When people feel uncertain, they will flee your environment for a place that satisfies their need for security.
Safety isn’t just about avoiding physical harm, however. It’s also about creating a welcoming environment that protects customers from unhappiness, embarrassment, and other negative emotions.
Make your space and food familiar, so that people will feel at ease.
For example, you can put brand-name condiments in view. While that might seem like a subtle strategy, people like to know that they’re getting quality ingredients that they know and love.
Simply putting jars and cans on display signals to customers that you understand their needs and you want to give them what they expect. The best thing about this strategy is that it costs very little money.
Create a social space for customers
People crave social interaction almost as much as they desire food.
Giving them a place to congregate and organizing?restaurant events?helps make your restaurant an attractive spot. You can bring in even more customers, though, when you hire friendly staff members that are willing to learn the names and preferences of regulars.
When a regular customer walks in, that person doesn’t get a generic greeting. Instead, they are greeted with a personalized greeting like “Hi, Mark. Do you want your usual table? We have a special tonight that I think you’ll like.”
When your employees and customers become friends, you discover how to increase your restaurant business without spending additional money.
Use descriptions to improve the value of menu items
People are willing to spend more money on foods they believe have higher values.
Stop treating your menu items like generic food, especially when you can turn your highest?profit margin foods?into some of your biggest sellers.
Creative descriptions give you an easy, inexpensive way to add value to menu items. For example, don’t describe your taco as “taco meat, lettuce, tomatoes, and sour cream.” That’s boring. Every restaurant does that.
Instead, use a description like “house-seasoned beef, shredded lettuce, fresh tomatoes, and sour cream served on a taco shell made this morning!”
Identify with your customers’ personality
Want to learn how to improve a restaurant and turn it from slow to busy? Start by identifying with your customers’ personality traits.
Most people want to support businesses that reflect their views and beliefs.
How you do this depends on the type of customer you want to attract. If you want to bring more young people through your doors, learn about youth culture and keep up with millennials’ restaurant habits.
If you want to attract an older, more conservative crowd, reflect their beliefs, so they feel comfortable spending money at your restaurant.
Feed your customers’ craving for novelty
People seek comfort and familiarity, but they also like novelty. You can appeal to this need with creative restaurant specials and?limited-time offers.
It doesn’t have to be complicated. Easy restaurant menu ideas make the best novelty items.
For instance, you could offer a?seasonal salad during the summer. It’s still just a salad, but it includes fresh items from local farmers. Emphasize this aspect since people are crazy about getting fresh produce with a?low carbon footprint.
8. Know Thy Customers… So You Can Persuade Them
Let’s be honest. Your restaurant has a few things that make it unique. For the most part, though, you sell the same items as your competitors. You may take a slightly different approach, but the average person doesn’t see what makes your restaurant special.
Until?you tell them?why they should choose you over other restaurants.
Your action plan to increase sales in a restaurant should include a unique sales position that grabs the attention of customers.
An effective sales plan needs to tell people:
Ideally, you can distill your unique sales position into a slogan like “fresh food from local farmers” or “authentic Mediterranean dishes from our grandmother’s recipe book.”
At this point, you’re selling more than items on your menu. You’re selling the?concept of freshness. You’re selling?authenticity.
You can also use identification and persuasion to increase take away sales. Let customers know that you identify with their busy lives by selling packaged food that they can take home for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
Suddenly, you’ll find yourself selling more items without spending more money on advertising. When you know how to persuade customers, a sign or suggestion from a server is all it takes to increase restaurant sales.
One other advice: get on social media and?develop your restaurant’s online presence. The more customers will “like” your restaurant and share their experience with others through reviews, the more you will be able to increase your restaurant sales… Since happy customers will constantly advertise for you.
9. Create a Mobile Restaurant App to Improve Customer Experience
What’s better than ordering food on a restaurant’s website? Ordering via a mobile app that you have conveniently downloaded on your phone.
If you want to improve your customers’ interaction with your restaurant. even more, get a?branded mobile app. Customers can use it to browse your menu, place orders for delivery and pickup, or book a table.
Add online payments to the mix so customers can do every part of the transaction online. No more exchanging dollar bills or realizing they don’t have enough change to tip the delivery person.
10. Implement a QR Code Restaurant Menu for Dine-in
Is there a way to digitize your customers’ experience while dining in? I’m glad you asked. Yes, yes, there is. You can say goodbye to printer menus in favor of a contactless ordering solution via QR codes.
All your customers have to do is scan the QR code, browse your menu, and place their order without interacting with a waiter. Isn’t that great?
SOURCE:
https://www.gloriafood.com/how-to-increase-restaurant-sales