This blog post will share details more specifically on how
to growth hack your restaurant sales. Click here to read the little restaurant that could blog post. If you haven’t already,
this will help you capture the vision of just what can happen for your
restaurant’s sales by implementing tools like Small Biz Dream.
Small Biz Dream allows you to collect data in the way the
little restaurant that could did with a simple survey on paper, or as we
explain later in this article with a few other creative and more automated
methods. We recommend doing all these
things at once for maximum sales growth.
A paper survey is a simple 1/8 piece of paper given out with
the bill to each person at the table by your wait staff. Include as many golf
pencils (can buy at any office supply shop for a few cents each, or better yet
order them with your restaurant name on them and let people “steal” them) as
you give surveys to keep the process easy.
Ask for their name and email address, and how they liked you
on a scale of 1 to 10. Food, service, ambiance. Ask them if they want to be on your mailing list, and offer something
for them to give up that data and be on your mailing list. Mailing list lets us send you great offers
and update you on menu changes etc., and 'bribe' them by saying they will be in
draw to win a $100 gift certificate each month drawn from all new newsletter
subscribers.
You have the option to do the data entry from the paper
yourself, or you can use our automated transcription service to do it for you.
The reason you want to collect this data and build a mailing
list is to eliminate sales vacancy. What
is sales Vacancy? An empty table when you have staff to cover it is sales vacancy, and sales vacancy is almost pure profit if you are at least breaking
even on your current sales volume.
Once you have this data collected, you can literally fill
your restaurant on a slow day with the click of a few buttons!
Let’s say you know Monday nights are often slow, you could
send an email to your list offering 2 for 1 appetizers during the slowest period
to bring people in. This is much more effective
than a sign out front, as it would be seen by all your customers, not just the
ones that walk by!
You could offer drink specials or have a happy hour you
announce with a mail blast (read our article on why this can work by clicking
here).
Want to really ramp up sales? Send out any specials you have new this week in your weekly
newsletter, and most importantly, a few you
will take off the menu AFTER this week. The funny part about this technique is
it creates urgency and scarcity at the same time, making it much more likely
someone will book to come and see you THIS week, vs later or when they get
around to it.
This leads to increased sales frequency which is a fantastic
sales growth hack. What if you could get each customer to come back to your
restaurant an extra 2 or 3 times per year.
Make them come every 3 weeks’ vs the natural ever 4 or 5 or 6 they
normally come. May that increase your
profits?
Let’s do some simple math.
If you have customers that come an average of 1 time per
month, and these techniques we are describing can get them to change that to
once every 3 weeks as your restaurant is now top of mind, AND they get
wonderful updates from you with specials, or notification of things going OFF
the menu, or time limited specials going onto the menu, watch what happens.
Let’s say you have only 1350 people in your data base. A
restaurant as small as 25 seats should easily have this within 3 months of
collecting data.
If you have 25 seats at 60% occupancy on average and say 40%
are new customer’s vs repeat after month one.
The math goes like this.
25 seats x 30 days in a month = 750 people in 1 month on
your mailing list.
In month 2, 750 x 40% = 300 new people on your mailing list
and each month thereafter.
In 3 months, you would have 1350 people on your mailing
list.
Let’s say only 60% were repeat type customers that come on
average 1 time per month. That gives us
810 people.
Let’s say your average bill is only $25.
Your annual sales from this would be 810 x $25 x 12 (months
in year) = $243,000/year.
If you now had them come back an average of once every 3
weeks what happens?
810 x $25 x 17.33 (52 weeks in a year divided by 3 weeks’
average visit to get how many times per year they come) = $350,932.50!!!!!
That is a 44% increase in sales, at little or no cost to you! As you know, one of your biggest expenses is getting a NEW customer!
Still not convinced on the value of having your customer
data?
If we look at the sales increase, divided by how many pieces of data you have, it will surprise you.
In one year, you would have collected 750 + (300 x 11) =
4050 pieces of data.
Your sales increase was $350,932.50 – $243,000 = $107,932.50
If you want to consider that you only have 1350 pieces of data, that means each customer email was worth $79.95 to you.
If you want to consider you had the 4050 pieces of data,
each customer email was worth $26.65!
So is it worth a bit of effort if the worst case scenario is
each piece of data you collect is worth a minimum of $26.65 to you?
So now you've seen the importance of collecting your customer
data, let's look at additional ways you collect it to even further growth hack
your sales!
You have the option to do the data entry from the paper
yourself, OR you can use our automated transcription service to do it for you.
One thing the little restaurant that could did NOT do, but
you may want to consider in addition to the paper survey, is a fish bowl draw.
Simply put a glass fish bowl at your front counter with a sign saying drop in your
business card for the chance to win a $100 gift certificate each month, or a
FREE LUNCH or whatever offer you feel you can afford to give to new subscribers
to your list. Make sure you have some survey forms beside the fishbowl for
anyone who missed them at the table and wants to fill one out.
Make sure you say on your sign that they will be added to
your mailing list.
Again you can transcribe the cards yourself, or use our
built in human transcription service to do it for you.
Get a tent card made for each of your tables that displays a
QR code and a Short URL leading to a mailing list subscription page, or even a
survey if you want to learn more about your customers. (this is another tool
included in the Small Biz Dream suite)
Collect newsletter subscribers from your website if you have
one, and if you do not have one, get one! It does not need to be super fancy,
but you do need at least a basic website!
It is simply amazing how many restaurants do not have their
own website, but just rely on the YELPS of the world to do it for them. This is BAD for your restaurant business. You should have your own website so these
other sites can link to it, this allows you to control the narrative a bit more
as your message how YOU want it to be seen is available to the public to OFFSET
any negative reviews you get. It simply
allows people to decide if the negative news is justified or not.
Without your own website, they have no choice but to form
all opinions from the other sites that are collecting data and comments on your restaurant business.
Small Biz Dream can be your simple website if you do not
have one. No additional costs, its just one of the integrated tools in our
Sales Growth Hacking Suite.
From your current website, or the one you set up in
Small Biz Dream you can direct people straight to your newsletter signup page
(also a tool in the Small Biz Dream suite), amplifying your in-store efforts
by building a list of those who have not yet visited you, or saving data entry
time/cost of those who join your list on their own.
Now you know the value of one piece of data is $26.65, you
can see that you have no excuse to not get going on this asap as the payback is fast and huge!
Depending on your type of restaurant, and if you take
reservations or not, there are a lot more tools in Small Biz Dream that can
benefit you.
Should you be a restaurant that takes reservations, imagine
the power of having this data, including a phone number you take when the
reservation is placed.
You can now track customer preferences, like for example,
what wine they ordered last time, or what their food preferences or allergies
are. Does it take a bit of work to
collect this data?
Of course!
Is it
worth it?
With $26.65 being the lowest
return on each piece of data, it would just get better and better as you learn
more and more about your customers!
A full mini CRM is also included in Small Biz Dream, which
includes a very powerful contact manager that you can use for collecting and
recalling this data.
Finally, the big elephant in the room; Social Media!
The restaurant that could, had a very cool strategy to build
its Facebook followers. They offered a small appetizer that was super easy to
prepare, low labour cost, and able to be done in advance. In their case they used Japanese Edamame, or
soy beans. They made literally a micro portion, about ¼ of the size of the portion you got if you ordered it from the
menu, served it in a funky container which made it seem special and not so
smart, and offered it free if you checked in and liked their Facebook page.
We would recommend you also do this for Twitter, as Facebook
has made it very hard to communicate with your fans without paying. Only about 2% of your page likes ever see
your posts organically in Facebook now. That said, it can be very cost effective to do an advertising campaign
only to your fans with Facebook.
The advantage of twitter is that it can still go viral.
Small Biz Dream has a great Twitter and other Social Media
tools built in to it's suite to help you manage these lists and posts.
Your social media campaign is most effective if it always
pushes people to join your mailing list. We know it sounds old fashioned but a good email list is still worth a
fortune to your business. Keeping up
with social media can make you seem more relevant and cool, so doing both with
the purpose of ultimately building your list is an very effective strategy.
So, are you ready to Growth Hack your restaurant sales?
Our suite of tools includes:
1.
Website builder
2.
Survey engine
3.
Card/survey form transcription service
4.
Automated email follow up
5.
Email blasting capability
6.
mini CRM
7.
Contact Manager
8.
Twitter list curator
9.
Social Media tools
We have a free 30 day trial (No Credit Card Required) so you
have nothing to lose.
Should you decide to pay our low $29/month subscription
after our 30 day free trial, we still offer you yet another 30 day money back
guarantee.
So from our example above, you can get to 1050 contacts
before you are locked in!
