How to Design Promotions for Your Restaurant, So Customers Line up to Buy Them

Promotion is a very popular marketing tool. However, promotions are not offered only to boost sales because there are many styles of promotion, depending on the goal of the promotion and the desired results. Let’s take a look at what promotions are good for restaurants and what the goal and desired results for each promotion are.

Clearance Promotion

This promotion is frequently seen and is meant for all types of products and services. For restaurants, this promotion isn’t suitable for boosting sales. Two main methods are used: One, if you’re trying to create traffic and draw people into the shop, for example, when a shop first opens, it’s fairly effective at drawing in customers. So, for this type of promotion, you need to understand that you might not make a profit, but you’ll get the customers and you’ll need to find a way to bring them back.

In the second method, this promotion is used to clear out the products before they expire. This is commonly seen at department stores in the food and bakery departments near the closing time or the expiration date. The discount on the products is over 70%. It’s better than letting the products expire and then throwing them out. However, you have to be careful about the quality. You shouldn’t wait until the last day to give the discount.

Freebie Promotion

The exchange, giveaway and freebie promotion is great for boosting sales. It gives the customers incentive to buy up to the conditional price you’ve set in order to get the freebie or giveaway, for example, if they eat up to 200 baht, they’ll get a free dessert or if they order up to 150 baht, they can buy a beverage for 1 baht. You already know well that the freebie or discounted item can cause you to lose money, but you can get more profit from the main items.

Group-Specific Promotion

If you want to boost sales or want more customers in a certain group, such as students or government officials, you can use a group-specific promotion.  For example, if the customer wears a student uniform or shows their student or government official ID card, they’ll get a 10% discount, etc. this has a chance of drawing the attention of specific groups to your shop.

Time-Specific Promotion

Restaurants don’t always sell well during every time period. Usually, the peak times are at noon or in the evening. Other times, such as before noon or in the afternoon, are quiet. Don’t forget, however, that you still have to pay the employees for every minute, even when there are no customers. Therefore, during the time periods when there are few customers, you can use the time-specific promotion to help you.  For example, you can have a 20% discount on every dish before 11:00 a.m. However, you first need to know your goal. This kind of promotion is used to earn money for paying wages, not profit, because it’s better than leaving the employees sit around with nothing to do.

Point Collection Promotion 

This type of promotion is a tool used for making the customers come back to use your services frequently. It’s usually used at beverage shops.  For example, customer can make a certain number of purchases or a certain number of cups and get a free drink. A word of caution: Don’t have conditions that are so complicated that customers feel discouraged or tired of collecting points. You can divide the points into levels to allow the customers to redeem their points more easily. That way, customers feel like they’re winning somethings and are encouraged to buy more.

Golden Hour Discount Promotionฃ

This is a classic promotion that’s still effective, for example, offer a golden hour promotion for the restaurant’s special dishes or for everything in the restaurant. What you have to be careful about is, one, don’t hold the event too frequently because the customers won’t feel enthusiastic about it.  Two, the kitchen might become overwhelmed, because the customers would all come at the same time. Therefore, you have to prepare everything you need and carefully estimate the number of customers.

Like and Share Promotion, an Ordinary Promotion That You Need – This is one promotion where we have to say, “Just do it!” It might look simple and plain, but it’s necessary to make people to Like and Share your restaurant’s page on their public social media page, so other people can have a chance to learn about your restaurant. You can give customers incentives to Like and Share your page by offering them a small freebie like a snack.

In the future, we’ll compile a list of other promotions and present them to you periodically. Nonetheless, what we want to really warn you about is that many operators’ understanding is that promotions are only used to boost sales. When their sales are down and they can’t think of anything else, they think of promotions. You have to be careful because promotions are like double-edged swords. If you don’t use them right and use them so frequently that customers become addicted to them, whenever you don’t offer them, the customers will demand them.  And if you don’t supply them, they’ll disappear. Consequently, you have to choose the right promotion for the situation and don’t use it too often. Most importantly, if you want to offer a promotion without hurting your own business, you also have to consider the costs.