Updated: Jun 19, 2020
Your restaurant sales are not growing fast enough. When you look at the sales data month to month and week to week, you realized that it is somewhat giving you a flat line.
Now, you are wondering what to do about it?
I'd like to share with you a few tips on how to increase your restaurant profits when your sales are dropping.
And I hope, after applying those ideas into your business, you will be equipped to:
Know why you are where you are
Identify the weaknesses of your restaurant
Try a few things that will bring some sales for you this month if done well
Determine what are the things you need to do so the sales are steadily growing
Analyze what has worked and what has not worked
So now, here are the 7 tips to help you grow your restaurant sales at the time of a sales dip:
1. Study your trends
I know this sounds really hard, but we need to study our trends. You and I must be excellent at analyzing our own progress.
This will require you to spend a couple of hours to see what worked and not in the past. What should you stop doing and start implementing now?
You need to eliminate things that are no longer working. Perhaps, they have not worked for a long time, but you just ignored them.
These may include:
Marketing initiatives that you've done but did not give positive results
Menu items that are no longer popular
People who are hard to train
When these things happen, you must acknowledge the fact that it's time for you to trim the fat.
If sales are not growing that much, this is a great time for you and me to sit down, and study our trends.
SWOT Analysis is one of the best ways to do this. The SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) Analysis can be a useful framework for you to have systematic and precise planning for your restaurant.
We have a YouTube video on how to conduct a SWOT Analysis, (you can watch it here on this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vePk26r5aA0&) where I talked about dozens of questions that you need to go over and answer.
This would help you identify the weaknesses of your restaurant. So, you must drop what's not working and bring new things for your business to grow.
2. Defibrillator Offer
The Defibrillator is a device that they used in medicine that delivers an electric shock to restore a person's normal heartbeat. It's a tool that they put on someone's chest and zaps their heart and wakes them up.
In restaurant marketing, you do need an offer that customers can not refuse and revive the relationship you had with your past customers.
The truth is, thousands and thousands of people have already gone through your restaurant in the last few years.
You may be here in this business for 2 or more years, and where are those people now, right?
You need to revive that relationship with them through your Defibrillator Offer.
What I mean by that is, you must give them an offer that they can not resist.
For example, next Monday, let's come up with a Defibrillator Offer.
For instance, in our pizzeria, a 16" pizza usually costs $15-$16. So for our Defibrillator Offer, we will give it for only $11.99. We will offer it just for one night, between 5 PM-8 PM, on that next Monday.
So, I will put all of my efforts to promote this one-time offer to our past customers.
Here's a fact: If you can bring back 10% out of 100, even 1 out of every 100 customers that you had in the past, you are hitting your goal.
Your restaurant is going to be busy, so you have to bring them back. Get in touch with them.
You need to have a strategy in place to collect your customers' email addresses and phone numbers.
This way, you can send a mass email or text message directly to them. Like it's 3 PM, and the offer starts at 5 PM, they are already thinking about dinner. This is going to be an offer they can't just decline.
If you have been collecting pick-ups or you have deliveries, you already have a lot of phone numbers. You may also have multiple email addresses if you do online orders.
For the next few days, that should be your focus. Crafting an email and text messages to send to your past customers.
As always, you need to consider the logistics. You must have a POS button and a team memo. Inform and schedule your staff accordingly so we can serve your customers very well.
Also, utilize your social media pages to post about your offer, as well as your local Facebook Groups.
If you want to know more about creating your own Defibrillator Offer, send us an email at makingdoughshow@gmail.com.
We also have a Making Dough Agency, where we serve our fellow restaurant owners with Text Message Marketing.
Visit our website at www.makingdoughshow.com, fill-up the form, and let's start your SMS marketing for your restaurant. We'll be happy to help you out.
3. Cut Cost
If you are going through a season where your sales are not growing fast enough, then we need to talk about losing weight.
If you a