The restaurant business is extremely demanding, so every successful restaurant needs a forward-thinking restaurant owner at its helm. While there are many ways you can reduce food and labor costs to pad your bottom line, you’ll need to think outside the box if you want to boost your top line revenue. In this post, we teach you 7 ways you can increase restaurant sales.
1. Embrace the power of restaurant upselling
No matter how well your restaurant is doing, there is always room for improvement. Through upselling, you can encourage restaurant guests to purchase more in order to increase the average size of each bill. In the end, you’ll generate more revenue and increase customer satisfaction.
There are multiple ways you can use upselling for increasing restaurant sales, but execution is key. Your front of house staff and restaurant POS system play essential roles in your upselling strategy, as they can employ numerous tactics such as:
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Suggesting side dishes
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Recommending a more expensive/higher profit margin menu item
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Highlighting potential add-ons (i.e. extra cheese or adding chicken to a salad)
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Offering dessert or other courses
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Advising the customer on wine or drink pairings
2. Leverage online ordering
Before the pandemic, online ordering was already on the rise. Customers want more ways to eat at their favorite restaurants, and online ordering is a great way to make that possible. Now that restrictions are being lifted and things are starting to return to normal, it’s more important than ever for your restaurant to have a functional online ordering system.
Whether you choose to partner with a delivery service or post a takeout menu online, it’s essential to make it easy for your customers to place and pick up their orders. If you want to go the extra mile, you can even consider offering curbside pickup to make the process even simpler. Incorporating online ordering will keep your customers happy and help you increase sales to customers who can’t or prefer not to dine in.
3. Optimize your menu
Your menu plays a crucial role in your restaurant revenue and profit margin, so it’s important that it’s optimized for your operation. You can start by rearranging your current restaurant menu to make higher margin items more visible, or renaming menu items to make them sound more appealing to diners. But if you’re willing to make some more substantial changes, these three techniques can really help you stand out:
Create multiple menus
Having multiple menus that are used for different functions will allow you to tailor your restaurant offerings to your audience and increase your sales. For example, you can create a takeout menu that’s separate from your dine-in menu to only sell items that travel well in order to maintain customer satisfaction. You could also implement a seasonal menu to take advantage of ingredients that are cheaper, therefore increasing your profit margin.
Shrink your menu
While this may sound contradictory to the last suggestion, the two are not mutually exclusive. No matter how many menus you have, you can actually increase restaurant sales by shrinking them down. Reducing the number of items on your menu will allow you to focus on food that has higher margins and can also help you better utilize your inventory to reduce waste.
Use a restaurant POS system
One of the most effective ways to optimize your menu is to use a restaurant point of sale system. A restaurant POS can help you manage your inventory, analyze the costs of ingredients, provide insights about your best (and worst) selling menu items, schedule orders, and more. Armed with this information, you can build a profitable menu that uses ingredients efficiently and minimizes waste.
4. Create customer incentives
Almost every restaurant has at least one loyal customer, but why stop there? Use customer incentives to attract new customers and encourage existing customers to keep coming back. You can do this by setting up a loyalty program, issuing gift cards, running social media promotions, and more. If you’re having trouble getting started, consider using a restaurant POS system to help increase customer loyalty.
5. Enhance your digital presence
Restaurant marketing is an often overlooked way to increase restaurant sales. But by building brand awareness, you’ll gain access to a new pool of potential customers. The restaurant industry is a perfect candidate for social media marketing because of how visual it is by nature.
Share high-quality pictures of your food on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, and with the right audience, your restaurant will almost market itself. Just make sure you have a responsive website or online ordering system set up so that followers can get in touch to place an order.
6. Maximize table turnover
The more diners you host, the more revenue you’ll generate. Make the most out of your dining room by maximizing table turnover so that you can reduce wait times and get new guests seated quickly. The best way to do this is to reduce down time, so you should focus on eliminating any unnecessary time spent on administrative tasks, ordering, sending orders to the kitchen, payment, etc.
Using a restaurant POS system, you can maximize table turnover by speeding up the ordering process, allowing contactless payments, automatically calculating tip percentages, and more.
7. Connect with your community
Food brings people together, so connecting with your community can provide a great way to gain exposure and attract local customers. Done properly, community involvement can also help you build brand awareness and customer loyalty. You can do this by participating in local restaurant weeks, sponsoring community events, hosting pop-ups or other events, collaborating with other local restaurants, or even volunteering in your community.
Final thoughts
There are a number of ways you can increase your restaurant sales, but the best approach will depend on your business and local market. But no matter your situation, a restaurant point of sale system can help you optimize your restaurant operation to maximize your profits. From inventory to payment and everything in between, it streamlines almost every aspect of your restaurant so that you can focus on running your business.