Your restaurant’s efforts to upsell guests or cross-sell additional items to them may fall by the wayside during a busy shift – or if it’s the responsibility of a new person on staff. But these incremental boosts in sales can mean a lot when you’re trying to maximize business during slower weeks of the year. It’s a good time to take a moment to make sure you’re maximizing sales opportunities – whether with the help of your technology or not. If you don’t have a tech stack that allows you to automatically upsell and cross-sell guests, train your staff boost their success in generating these sales by helping them choose the right moment to suggest a menu item (and doing so enthusiastically but not aggressively), giving them some specific and high-margin items to focus on, focusing on orders where your guests generally welcome some extras (delivery or takeout, for example), and ensuring your staff can pick up cues that a guest is not interested in ordering additional items. Even if you do have upselling and cross-selling capabilities through your POS, review them to make sure you’re making the most of them – just in case having the technology has made it easier for you to set a task and forget about it. You can ensure you capitalize on sales opportunities if you review your guest’s sales journey to make sure they are getting the written and visual messages throughout the process that feel natural to them, set various prompts/deals/promotions and then measure their success, and continuously look for ways to assess and improve each step of the sales journey. Acquiring new guests is five times as expensive as trying to change the behavior of your existing ones, according to research from Invesp. So how can you entice a happy-hour customer to stay for dinner, a morning-coffee lover to add a breakfast sandwich to their order, or a weeknight diner to return for lunch the next day? A recent report from Modern Restaurant Management advises operators to focus on guest segmentation and follow through with personalized messaging to nudge guests in a new direction (while ensuring you’re not swamping them with messages that don’t resonate). It helps to consider time and place when planning your outreach. For instance, a person who comes for Thursday happy hour is more apt to take you up on a weeknight appetizer or dinner offer if they receive your promotion at a time and place where they are able to take you up on it – not on a weekend, or after they are back at home for the evening after work. You can gain insights into guests’ preferences by mining your data – your loyalty program, online reservation records and even your WiFi hotspot can all inform you about when guests are visiting you and what their taste preferences are. From there, you can approach guests in a number of ways based on their behavior and when you’re trying to drive traffic. That could be sending a text when they are on premise to entice them to return the next day for a deal on an appetizer, reaching out to guests visiting during slow periods and offering loyalty reward points for return visits during those periods, or contacting them shortly after a visit to incentivize them to leave a review on social media platforms where you need a boost. |
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