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Ever felt like it is getting difficult to sustain the business in the competitive restaurant industry?
There are a plethora of restaurants available. There is dine-in, takeaways, food coupons, combos, and meal boxes are often offered at restaurants.
Competition everywhere!
And of course, the Covid-19 dilemma has affected all restaurants. People are bothered about social communications. In such a situation, you always feel like you could be doing more to boost restaurant sales.
Looking for creative and innovative ways to increase the sales and profits of your restaurant?
Here are some suggestions and ideas you can try:
1. Increase your mobile presence
Nowadays almost all people use mobile devices to access internet facilities. It makes the people stay for a longer time on your website thus increases engagement. So your business website has to be optimized for tablets and mobiles. Make sure the website looks fine on desktops, tablets, mobiles alike. Try these tips to boost your mobile presence:
- List your business on Google My Business – Don’t be worried if you do not have a website. Create a Google My Business (GMB) listing to help customers find your business. Once you provide the phone number, address, hours of operation, and pictures of the location you can list your business. GMB listing allows the customers to write reviews and upload pictures of your food online.
- Create social media accounts – Try opening social media accounts for your business and carry on an online presence. You can hire a manager to monitor messages and reply to the inquiries coming through your social networks in case you don’t have time.
- Publish advertisements through social media – A business account for social media helps you to announce any events you may be hosting. If your business is unexpectedly closing, you can alert customers. Of course, it is the perfect way to humanize your brand linked with
your community. In fact, social media is a tool used to achieve customer retention strategies.
2. Analyse your online ordering strategy
Do you offer delivery or takeaway at your restaurant? If so, you should be providing an online ordering facility at your restaurant. The benefits are fair: online orders are 26 percent profitable than call-in or walk-in orders. One-third of customers prefer the online mode of food ordering. So pay attention to these. Online ordering maximizes customer loyalty and decreases the work pressure on workers taking orders over the phone.
3.Use proper restaurant technology
Do you wish to serve more customers in less time?
The answer is really simple – Use a point of sale software
The Point of Sale (POS) refers to the area of a store where customers execute the payment for their purchases of services and goods. A restaurant POS can take out some steps of front office functioning. It also speeds up transactions using a POS machine. POS machine is part of the checkout procedure of processing a debit card or credit card to finalize the transaction. Also, it increases the sales of your business because the more customers you treat, the more money you get.
An efficient restaurant POS sale system will also enhance your bookkeeping operations. All items in the menu along with corresponding prices are added to it. Each order that is put into the system is traced, and promos can be accounted for.
4. Maximise your table turnover rate
The clear way to sell more food is to serve more customers. Table turnover becomes important at this point. You cannot decide how long the customers will spend to eat their food, what you can do is to increase the efficiency of your service. Below listed are some tips: Try them out,
- Keep your staff on schedule – Confirm that there is a sufficient number of employees in your restaurant to cater to all the guests in dine-in. Teach your staff to take orders well-timed and manage the arrival of guests.
- Have a well-arranged seating system – Quality hostess stands and reservations are the commonly used seating systems restaurants use to have an idea of how many guests to expect and to manage the guests.
- Use technology for additional benefit – Going with the pace of technology is highly beneficial. Some restaurants use a POS system for sale to improve guest experience, inform business decisions to customers, and to increase their restaurant sales.
- Alter your menu to be compact – Limit the number of items on your menu card. It cut down the number of time customers take to decide their food and the amount of time your chef takes to prepare that.
- Renovate your dining room – Arrange your furniture’s in a simple hassle-free and elegant way so as to please your guests and make them spend a bit more time in your restaurant. Remember to arrange small parties at smaller tables so that you can save enough space for the large parties.
5. Offering mini plates
Instead of ordering a full meal majority of customers are opting for mini-meals or mini plates today. So it would be the best option to consider a higher number of smaller dishes for your guests. Studies indicate that the demands for small meals are increasing. The smaller plates should include low- calorie, gluten-free snacks along with other savoury food items.
6. Price the menu right
It is necessary to price the food items on the menu card at a reasonable price. It should be done carefully. Keep in mind your location, cost, and target audience. The price should be comparatively low if your targeted customers are college students. Or if the target audience is posh communities you can keep a relatively higher price.
It is advised to do research on your neighbouring before deciding your menu price. Also, remember about your competitors. If they sell the same food at a lower cost than you in the same location, your sales are going to face a huge drop. If you increase the cost of food the net sales of your restaurant will also increase.
You should have a clear idea of how to set a proper menu price. If you suddenly increase the cost, your food may not acceptable for the customers. So try to increase in small installments that will not catch customer attention but increase sales.
What are the best practises you can do to boost your restaurant sales?
To keep up with the rapid changes in the restaurant industry and also the growing needs of customers, you need to implement new methods to the game.
1.Upselling
No matter how higher your business sales are, there are certain chances in which you would still like to increase your restaurant’s POS sales. Restaurant upselling is one of the easiest ways to do this.
Upselling is the process of persuading customers to buy more items or improve their current purchase. Restaurant upselling is the most usual strategy used to boost profits.
2. Hosting events
You can arrange a guest performance, music shows, or other mind-blowing events to force your customers to visit your restaurant again and again. Instead of just hosting, make events publicize to reach maximum peoples.
Along with bringing the regular customers hosting events will help reveal you to many customers. It may not give you a huge sale increase in one single night, but it is highly worth it for a restaurant.
3.Try to be available for local customers easily
Local customers are known as the lifeline of every restaurant. Creating Loyal and profitable customers is quite an important task for restaurants. Almost all customers find information about the restaurants using local search. Manage your listing on mapping sites and search engines to help you make your restaurant’s information more reachable to customers.
4. Communicate with your workers
Managers need efficient works from employees so as to increase sales. Employees should know the sales plan of management. Conduct regular meetings with your employees to let them know about your strategies and plans.
Performance of staff clearly exhibits at your restaurant. Always remember that good staff can make a good restaurant, and poor staff will put your business scale down. Leadership is very important. Always maintain healthy communication with your crew.
5. Online marketing and updated website
Among the wide use of technology, the outreach of digital marketing has gone beyond the borders. Ensure your constant presence on social media and make potential customers well informed of new add-ons in the menu, and the latest events going to host. Create an attractive and informative website and update it from time to time for your business to have growth in sales and profits.
6. Distribute posters and pamphlets
You have to market your restaurant well in order to have customers. Both offline and online marketing should give equal importance. However, it is not a good practice to completely focus on online marketing strategies and neglecting offline marketing. Distribution of pamphlets and flyers are included in offline marketing. There are some old aged peoples also. They might be not familiar with technology and they read newspapers and pamphlets to know about the new restaurants.
How to implement innovative tactics to enhance sales?
1. Email marketing
Email marketing is also an important kind of marketing. It helps to create a long-term relationship with your customers and also helps to increase sales. Since there is no word count limitation in sending emails, you can send long information like emails. Periodical newsletters can be sent through email to make your customers alert about the events that take place at a restaurant.
2. SMS marketing
SMS Marketing is a way to create a short term relationship with your clients. You will get customer information from your customer database, but still, if you want to gain more sales you can use SMS
Marketing. Just send an SMS to all the customers in your database when you put any offers. The SMS also contains a hyperlink to ordering sites. This will tempt the customers and in turn, increase your sales.
3. Analyse reports
Acquire your restaurant with POS insurance. Use a POS capable of handling business and sales. Restaurant POS is the one that provides every info that happens at your restaurant. Even if you are physically present or not, you can get detailed reports of the number of discounts and offers given, sales overall outlets, the total bill generated things that reached their expiry date, etc.
By using the detailed report, you can figure out which is most moving and which one is less wanted. Consult your chefs accordingly and change your menu card.
4. Establishing a wonderful guest experience
Undoubtedly, tasty food is the main factor that attracts customers to your restaurants. Along with tasty food, if you offer them a nice and soothing guest experience, it will be a lasting impression for sure. Your restaurant should be able to give them a home-like feeling.
Make them relax and comfortable, serve good food with love and care to live up to their expectations. Amaze your guests with complimentary gifts. Give them an extra cheesy pizza or tasty pastry to confirm their revisiting.
5. Providing offers
The best way to attract regular and new customers is to provide exciting offers to them on any special occasion. Cater to your guests with unique recipes and sweets of the festivals. This kind of strategy helps to boost your restaurant sales during the festive season. Offer complimentary donuts, cakes, and chocolates during Christmas or New Year festive time since they tend to attract people very quickly.
Wrapping up
These are just a few suggestions to grow your restaurant sales and profits. If you want to increase your restaurant revenue, keep track, and monitor the profit needle. Technology can regularly help, with EPOS for takeaways and the point of sale software in restaurants facilitating operators and restaurant owners to do accurately that. But when you observe a small increase in sales, study why. Analyse what worked and determine can you put double effort into it?
Make your restaurants stand out from others by implementing these strategies.
Don’t be confined to a single thing to increase sales at your restaurant. Look for all aspects that can help you in generating revenue and eventually you can see your growth.
