Drive more sales to your restaurant business with these innovative ideas
The food and beverage industry is massive, and it is predicted to grow in the next five years, owing to an expansion in the consumer base and rising disposable income. The UAE restaurant industry, on the other hand, has an abundance problem. Several restaurants are fighting for clients, therefore restaurant owners must concentrate on attracting more customers and increasing restaurant sales.
Restaurant sales are rarely consistent, and they are affected by a variety of factors like competition, seasonal swings, and the changing economy.
Here’s a list of creative ideas that may help you to increase restaurant sales:
Introduce a Restaurant Website or Mobile App
Though if you own a non-digital local restaurant, your storefront is no longer the face of your business. The website is the most essential aspect in assessing a restaurant’s reputation, according to 88 % of individuals who go online to research products or services. If your restaurant’s website isn’t up to standard, customers will most likely leave it at a single glance.
Your restaurant’s website or mobile app must have an elegant design, attractive features and it should be properly functional as well with easy navigation. Additionally, keep in mind that most people use their smartphones to conduct research of this nature, whether they’re at home, in the car, at work, or elsewhere – your website must be mobile-friendly.
Prioritize the Upselling
Up selling is a great technique to boost sales and draw attention to your high-profit food items. Getting consumers to purchase your most profitable meal item, as well as enticing them to get a dessert or a side dish, can increase the value of their average ticket.
Train your restaurant staff and employees to provide support to your visitors without going overboard. Your employees can recommend food to your guests, but they must not be forced to order it. Regular clients can have things suggested to them based on their likes and ordering habits. You can use your POS to help you re-sell popular and high-profit items. Waiters and servers can use the Server’s App to take orders from a handheld restaurant ordering system that shows the whole menu as well as the most popular items. CRM connectivity allows your waiters to monitor client ordering history and up sell things based on the preferences of the customer.
Make the Most of Your Restaurant Menu
Your restaurant menu has the ability to dramatically increase restaurant sales if it is designed correctly. Customers will see and order your high-profit and popular items first if you emphasize them. Add enticing menu descriptions that encourage customers to order more, and the restaurant will automatically upsell goods and improve sales.
You should also review and update your restaurant menu on a regular basis to identify and replace problematic products. Adding new items to the menu is a terrific approach to attract clients while also helping to boost sales.
Implement Online Ordering
It’s great to have a beautiful restaurant where people may dine, but having an online ordering option is much better. More people in the UAE are looking for restaurants that deliver because it is more convenient to eat in the privacy of their own homes or workplace! According to a survey, 60 % of UAE customers purchase food through an app.
You must either partner with an established online ordering website or a food delivery app in the UAE, such as Talabat, or permit online ordering through your own website or app. The majority of smartphone users consider online meal delivery applications and websites to be a more convenient approach to satisfying their hunger.
Online ordering broadens your horizons and allows you to reach out to more audiences who may or may not be able to dine at your restaurant.
Boost Your Restaurant’s Online Presence
The worldwide food and beverage business has been thought to be more internet-savvy than ever before in the last two years. If you don’t have an internet presence yet, you’re not on the right track to success. You can build your own website and app (which is expensive, time-consuming, and frequently buggy), or you can join Blink for Restaurants and improve your restaurant’s digital presence.
You will obtain a regular stream of organic orders if you have a branded website that is SEO optimized.
The branded apps are always amazing and worthy, allowing your clients to place orders from your restaurant with a single click of a button.
Marketing Creatively to Attract Customers
Marketing has evolved into an essential component of restaurant operations, and it plays a crucial role in raising restaurant sales.
With more than 70% of UAE residents utilizing the internet, you can’t overlook the value of online marketing in improving your restaurant’s sales. Most individuals, particularly travellers, look for restaurants online before deciding where to eat. As a result, if you want to increase foot traffic to your restaurant, you must focus on online marketing.
Restaurants offer fantastic online opportunities to reach out to potential customers, such as social media marketing and Google My Business listings.
You can also construct audience-specific campaigns based on demographics and behavior by investing in sponsored advertisements on Facebook and Instagram as it’s a trending and highly effective marketing strategy for restaurants. It allows targeting a certain demographic, allowing you to cater to clients depending on their preferences.
Offer Customers to Sample a Dish.
Entice your customers from time to time by offering them a sample dish to taste, this methodology helps you to gain good feedback and more new customers. This is the most successful and cost-effective way to market a restaurant and establish brand recognition. Every public event that attracts your target audience is an opportunity to provide product samples. Choose the best 2-3 dishes from your menu that can be easily transportable, and send out some solid restaurant representatives to meet and greet at the events and also try to offer those dishes to your customers at no cost need.
Prioritize Customer Retention
When compared to a new customer, loyal consumers spend 67% more on average! What, on the other hand, encourages client loyalty? The first step toward customer retention is consistency in food and service quality. Then there’s excellent customer service and demonstrating that you care. In the competitive market of the UAE, however, these have become a requirement rather than a uniqueness.
Customers will return to your restaurant if you have loyalty programs and rewards memberships in place. You can give customers reward points based on how much they spend at your restaurant, which they can use to reduce their total due bill, or you can give them a complimentary item on their next visit.
It’s difficult for people to deny an attractive offer, so this is a terrific approach to keep your clients coming back to your restaurant. Use a POS system to quickly integrate and manage your loyalty program across all of your ventures.
Organize Events
Restaurant owners in the UAE often offer special events around major holidays such as Eid to boost sales, but festivals aren’t the only time you can host events.
You may organize special events such as a “Curry Festival”, “Desserts Fest” etc, where you make several varieties of curries or delightful desserts from across the world and invite people to taste them.
These types of events are a terrific way to get more customers into your business and boost revenue. You can plan unique events based on the audience you want to reach.
Above anything, don’t forget to let people know about the events. Send out emails, SMS messages, and make social media posts about it. This will broaden the audience and raise awareness of the event. This is one of the most effective restaurant marketing techniques.
Introduce Attractive Rewards
Offering discounts is the best method of increasing restaurant sales. Special offers and discounts, maybe rendered meaningless unless they are properly strategized. Instead of providing a blanket discount to all of your customers, you can create personalized incentives to entice customers to order from your restaurant again. Consider the case of a customer who hasn’t visited your restaurant in a month. You can offer your regular customers, a 10% to 20% discount on their most often ordered item. Through a clever integrated Marketing Module, you can effortlessly extract this data from your POS and perform unique offers and discount promotions.
Summing up
We anticipate that the restaurant industry will make even more progress by the end of this year. Restaurants must increase their internet sales while also fine-tuning their restaurant management capabilities since a positive bottom line is crucial for all entrepreneurs. We hope that after reading this blog post, you will have a better understanding of How to Increase Restaurant Sales Online and Beyond.
If are in a way to integrate your restaurant with a well-developed POS software system, then you should proceed with our multifunctional retro POS system. Get in touch with us any time for its quick implementation and further discussion to know about our ERP inbuilt restaurant growth software system.