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These tips and techniques will work well for any business. However, we selected to apply it to restaurants because we believe that the restaurant industry works on retention and communications. Because of the over building of restaurant businesses nationwide and the amount of growing restaurant competition, customer retention is essential.
Seven Steps to Costumer Retention
Step 1
The first step is to generate a real buzz locally about your restaurant. Advertisements are a great start with the locals, and you can even create a discount (as a last resort) for those that are living in your local zip codes if they come in for dinner on Sunday through Thursday nights. Save your full price seats for weekends when you are always busy with visitors and locals already, or you should be anyways.
Step 2
Lets talk about your website here for a minute. Be sure that for the visitors (because it is not going to be used by the locals too much) that the website is updated regularly with information about events or tastings.
For locals, post event days, times, and details for special upcoming evenings. It is easy, and it does not cost much to do either.
Be sure that regardless of whether you have a single location or a chain of locations that you check to be sure that your website comes up for restaurants in that city under all kinds of word combinations or searches on your favorite internet search engine. Try this for each city’s restaurant location.
Extra Tip:
Add a sign up box for your site that asks your guests for their first and last name along with their email address. Put this box on several of your website pages and have the webmaster create a ‘Comma Deleted Format” database to store this information. We will explain why you are doing this below.
Step 3
Lets go over your marketing materials. Have table cards or displays on each table. Also, put these cards in a holder in your waiting area with information about your restaurants events coming up, like wine tasting, chef cooking evenings, or anything that will be of a great interest to locals more than visitors. This is important, because your out-of-town business leisure travelers will more than likely not base nor plan their trips around your events.
More In-Restaurant Promotional Locations
At each event, have a card requesting your guest’s first and last name as well as their email address that asks the persons at the table to sign up for future events. Because if they are at an event, they are more than likely willing to sign up to be included in upcoming events.
Be sure your cards include your website address without those www. Just put it on your printed material like this: MyRestaurant.com. That way, your materials are up to the way technology is currently used.
Extra Tip:
Another excellent idea is to get some “welcome to xxxxx city” display cards customized and sent out to all of the local hotel concierges. These hard working people see all of the visitors, one way or another, while they are here in your city. Treat these concierges well ($$$), because every restaurant and attraction that they recommend to visitors have a greater chance of being visited.
Step 4
Each restaurant has a waiting area. So, to us, it is like having a captive place where people sit and look at everything from those awards that you or your staff have earned to images of some of your chef’s finest presentations. Either way, you can do more with this area of your restaurant.
Extra Tip:
Go out and find or buy one of those fancy colored crystal bowls. In front of this bowl, put a typed sign that explains that by dropping their card in this bowl, they will receive customer loyalty discount (because they are in your restaurant now) offers, via email, from time to time. We will explain why you are doing this below.
Step 5
Let’s get your restaurant some press locally. If what you are doing locally is great enough, then we will share how to get those releases into the travel magazines as well.
We suggest that you attach your restaurant to one of the local chapter national fundraisers for a luncheon or dinner event, but, remember, this is for the slower weekdays.
These are generally profitable for your restaurant, by the way. We do not want you to just give things away; this is your business, and nothing is for FREE.
The reason that we want you to select a national charity with a local chapter is that you might get national coverage through their newsletters. These charities usually have two of them: their electronic and their US mail style newsletters. This might also get you coverage in the surrounding regional news publications and television as well.
This type of approach can be done if you can work closely to get volunteers from the charity for that event. You can then make the event an annual event as well.
This will get your restaurant into the local social scene, a very top level place to be when you need to depend on the local market for business during weekdays or seasonal quiet times. People like to eat where they know that the restaurant is involved in helping others in the community. Additionally, donators generally have discretionary income to spend at your restaurant.
Step 6
Referrals and word of mouth business building is so important. Restaurant owners, you might not know this (but we bet you do), your customers tend to return because of the staff. And the staff starts with you, the owner. Customers always seem to love the owners of restaurants. Everywhere we go and everyone we talk to say this is true.
Now, if you are not already doing this, you might be missing out on the restaurants best asset: pimping out the owner. This is true in all of the restaurants that we visit and this is what the restaurants that have been around for many years do.
The following is the tactic used by the single location restaurants:
The owner of the restaurant makes his rounds, says “hello”, shakes hands with each person, and talks a little extra with regulars, especially when that regular has guests at their table that look new to the restaurant. The owner should never ask how the food is, because it should be assumed that the food is perfect. After all, it should be. As the owner, if you feel compelled to have to ask how their meal was, have your help ask this while they are serving the tables.
The following is the tactic used by the multi location chain restaurants:
We see how multi chain restaurant owners handle the hand shake recognition practice. The following example is from a real restaurant chain, located in several states that has 10 to 25 locations.
An annual anniversary dinner that you can advertise again locally and to draw a crowd as well as get some local press in each city. By having these special dining night events with the owner once a year, the annual return customers will pack the house while adding even more new customers each year.
Another idea is special "dining with the owner" events. These generally allow you to charge more for this single night. The referrals from your loyal following are going to go through the roof when they tell their friends what, where, and with who they had dinner with. This will cause some viral communications for your restaurant or your restaurant chain.
Step 7
This is the final step on how to not only survive, but to grow your restaurant business.
We have suggested that you collect customer information, like birth dates and email addresses, through fill out forms on your tables at events. We have suggested that you have a bowl with a sign to drop their business cards in your waiting area, and we have asked you to build a sign up box on some of your website pages.
Now, we are going to share about the competitor advantage, and, in fact, the lowest cost marketing tool that you can use today to build on your brand, your customer loyalty, and, all of this at the same time, grow your business, even during these rougher economies.
Sign up to utilize an email marketing service. We suggest our ViperMailer.com. Go here and see our email marketing services to open an account.
It is going to cost you starting at $24 per month for 1000 contacts. We are going to have you add your database from your website of those names that you have been collecting. You will be able to upload them automatically to your confidential account area.
We next are going to ask that your webmaster install a small piece of software code (optional) onto your website to bring those names into your account at ViperMailer.com automatically. As they sign up, your new contacts are kept fresh, and those interested can receive messages from you from time to time.
Next, you are going to take all of those business cards and those table event sign up forms and have someone take a little time to add them to your ViperMailer.com account. We suggest that you or your trusted employee do this task every couple of weeks to get your new email contacts into your emailing offers on a consistent basis.
Next, you should design a colorful template using one of the 70+ we already offer for free. You might want to take this a step further and have your webmaster build a custom template using HTML code (the webmaster will know what this is if you do not), and they can upload the branded content for your restaurant template into your account at ViperMailer.com. From the uploaded template, you can build it on your own each month.
You are now in a great position to gain marketing traction for your restaurant, and your competition is going to see that you are growing your business and that you are a force to be reckoned with. |
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