How to Increase Restaurant Sales

You maybe well positioned, located with very skilled servers and a nicely presented menu that makes customers hungry. Also, that might be equipped with a brilliant ambience and very delicious food. But when looking at your sales, we all go “ummm… what’s wrong?”. That is when you feel you have done everything right but not got the expected revenue numbers. Then you ask how to increase restaurant sales?.

In this article, we discuss a few proven tips to increase restaurants sales so, if done well, they can have a long lasting sustainable positive effect.

Upselling Heroes

If trained well, your servers can greatly increase restaurant sales without customers even noticing. That simply happens with first building a rapport to gain their trust then steering the whole ordering process.

Assume an Appetizer

If you started the ordering process by “what appetizers would you like to have?”, most people will feel they have to have it. So this is a very effective psychological trick you can use and it is %100 ethical and legal. Then it’s up to them to decide how many appetizers to order and that heavily depends on how many they are.

So bottom line is, to increase restaurants sales, servers should always assume customers are ordering appetizers to make them do so. Tweet

Suggest After-Food Orders

If your customers had a good and joyful experience the moment they walked in till they finished, chances to order more increase. Therefore, suggesting a dessert or a drink after the main course is over might work which means they’ll pay more.

Increase Rate of Table Turnover

You can’t plainly tell your customers eat and leave quickly, but you want them to do so. That’s because increasing tables turnover rate at your restaurant helps you can serve more people which leads to an increase in your sales. Tweet

To achieve that, You need first to guide customers to where they need to go the moment they enter your restaurant. This helps better coordinate between those who have reservations and walk-in guests to make movement inside the restaurant smooth and efficient. Then make sure they sit on a fit table and once they are seated, serve them quickly.

Also, try to make your menu as clear and neat as possible. Having a badly presented hard to read menu can increase the ordering time significantly. That is obviously not going to help you increase the rate of table turnover.

Using the technology at restaurants can help a lot speed up the order taking time as well as the payment time (Tweet). If you have a tablet through which customers can order and pay, you end up saving the a lot of their and your server’s times because everything is self serviced. So you receive the paid order at your kitchen to prepare and once they’re done, they leave without taking more time for payment.

Last but not least, check on them after they finish. They will feel that they spent a long time at the restaurant which pushes them to leave, professionally.

Increase Customer Loyalty

Loyal customers keep coming back again and again. This means each one spends more money and that increases their lifetime value. This a very important marketing metric that you need to always watch for and try to improve.

When customers are registered in the loyalty program, they will keep an eye on their reward and try to increase it. This means they’ll ignore other restaurants and come to you because they want to increase their rewards so they – one day- get free food.

The program could be that they earn points each time they buy so once a number is reached, they redeem it. Or you give them a free order after a number of purchases, of course, after calculating which item to give for free. Either way, it has to increase restaurant sales and lead customers to keep coming back again and again as this is the only factor to measure. If this works well, word will be spread out so their friends and family will join too which is great.

Use Online Ordering

It is a fact that making the ordering process as easy as possible increases your sales. A great way is to provide an online ordering system so customers can easily view menu and place orders. Orders can be delivery orders so customers can enjoy the smooth experience of getting food fast and east. Or pickup so they seamlessly submit their orders before they arrive so they don’t waste your and their time queuing up to get their orders.

To increase restaurant sales

You have to have well trained servers who can professionally upsell. Also, focus on how to get customers eat and leave quickly to free up tables for other new customers. At the same time, have them come back and order again through a well implemented loyalty program that is, preferably, tracked via an online ordering system. Those techniques will definitely help you increase restaurant sales sustainably.

Should Restaurants have Online Ordering System?

Today, food lovers have become attracted not only to good food, but also to a good food ordering experience. In the past, the expectations of customers were mainly good physical experience and decorations. This is because it was mostly dine in. Today, the whole game has changed due to the advent of advanced technologies. Due to that, customers expect a good digital experience, easy ordering and an excellent and unique service. That is why having an online ordering system has become as crucial as serving a delicious food for restaurants. Here is the top reasons why restaurants should have it.

Unlimited Growth

If you’re selling online, you’re not limited to how many orders your call center’s agents can take and walk-in customers you have everyday. Your potential is unlimited because you can receive as many orders as you can handle. Simply calculated, if you digitally target only your neighborhood, you find yourself reaching thousands of people instead of a couple of dozens calling or walking in.

Worldwide, Online food ordering revenue is growing by %17.1 year over year and expected to be $137 billion industry by 2023. That is definitely happening because today’s generation is moving towards high tech restaurants that provide easy online ordering system and excellent experience.

Branding Necessity

It is a fact that there is 3.5 billion google search per day which means today’s people’s first brand investigation is online search. The question is, what do they find when they search your restaurant’s name? Chances are either they find you, or someone else talking about you in reviews or so or your competitor targeting google search with your name. So if you don’t have a good digital presence crafted according to your branding guidelines, then this will have a big negative impact.

Customers under Control

Once you acquire a customer, hola, you got his data forever. This is important for your restaurant to analyze them and their behaviors interacting with your online ordering system (website and app). The primary goal of this analysis is to increase retention and revenue through applying some digital marketing techniques. Believe it or not, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70% whereas the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%.

Things you can know about your customers are countless. You can know how frequently they order from you, who are the biggest customers, who hasn’t ordered for a while …etc. Those insights offer a great help to understand your customers in order to apply the marketing techniques to increase your revenue.

Keep your Commissions

No doubt, every restaurant has its loyal customers and lovers who order more regularly. So if you don’t simplify the ordering process for them to directly order from you, then they’ll go to the food aggregators who’ll charge high commissions. Therefore, it’s a very strategic step for restaurants to have their own online ordering system to keep their own margins from flying out of the window.

Online Ordering System with Taker

To stay ahead in your highly competitive business, you must have your own branded online ordering system that includes a website and an app, contact Taker now.

Online Ordering, what is it?

Centuries back when online ordering wasn’t known and things were simple and basic, the way food was looked at was just to feed the body to stay alive. So feeding people was (and still is) considered a good act because it definitely is the reason for them not to cease. Then, after economy improved and the quality of life got better, people started to perceive food not only as way to sustain but also as a joyful experience.

Food as a Business

Later on, people saw food as a business opportunity. So people came up with the idea of selling it which -in turn- developed the concept of eating out. This has today become a conventional social behavior which announced the birth of restaurants.

When the industrial revolution struck, people got jobs and had to spend most of their day out busy working. Also, they would get home mostly in the evenings. With such busyness, some of them just did not have time to cook or go out to eat. Therefore, another business opportunity was found which was food delivery ordering.

So instead of online ordering or taking orders at cashier desk, restaurants equipped themselves with phone technology. So started taking orders through it for those who can’t come. With that, they also designated employees to deliver the food to the locations of the busy customers who ordered through the phone. So phone orders have become something that is taken for granted when it comes to restaurants.

Consequently, cashier desk and phone had been the only and most effective ways for restaurants to take orders. Of course, that was to increase sales and provide customers with a joyful experience to make them loyal. That was before the era of online ordering.

Online Ordering

If you think about the traditional ways to take orders, they greatly pose an efficiency problem. The reason is that they greatly limit the number of orders that can come at a given time. For example, if you have 4 call center agents and each order takes 5 minutes to be completed, then it means you can’t take more than 48 orders an hour -assuming back to back calls. This means, if you have 3 hours daily as a peak, then you can’t take more than 144 in peak hours. That is obviously a problem that does not exist in online ordering.

As a result, online ordering concept was developed where customers can order by themselves through a website or an app. This basically frees the restaurants from the traditional order taking capacity constraints that they had suffered from for a long time. With no doubt, that has may benefits to restaurants such as an increase in sales and efficiency in order preparation.

To have your own branded online ordering system, contact Taker now.