Rewards Network offers 12 tips to prepare your staff, space, and menu to accommodate private events. Along the way we also offer ideas for getting the word out to attract attention.

Download this free e-book today and get ready to (host a) party.

The post PARTY TIME: 12 Ways to Maximize Sales with Summer Events appeared first on Rewards Network.

Can my menu help increase my restaurant sales?

In our newest report, we walk through four big factors that can help you decide whether your restaurant menu design is a big success or holding you back:

• Restaurant menu design
• Pricing of individual dishes
• Overall menu size
• Seasonality of offerings

Download this free eBook today to see if your menu is working as hard as it can to increase your sales.

Excerpt from Chapter 1:

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years in the food industry, it’s that every menu is some restaurateur’s baby. That can be a problem. Yes, your menu is the heart and soul of what a chef and owner want to put out into the world, but your menu is also key to ensuring you make money when you do. This dual reality can sometimes be difficult to reconcile.

Many restaurateurs express an emotional connection to every item listed on their menu, but at the end of the day, when everything is special, nothing is. It’s important to recognize opportunities for bigger profit, and identify ways to structure your menu not just to attract new customers, but to keep those customers coming back for more — again and again.

Know what you have.

Before you work on revising your menu layout, it’s important to conduct the cost audit we referenced briefly in the introduction. It is the only way to truly understand how every single item on your menu actually works for you in terms of profit and popularity. Once your analysis is complete, you’ll likely find some dishes from all four categories of items: Plow horse, star, dog, and puzzle.

Plow horse: low profit, high popularity

This could be your soup and salad lunch special, a one topping pizza, or that draft beer that seems to pull people in after work day after day. The plow horses are items that you probably sell a whole lot of, because they are priced with sensitivity to consumers who aren’t looking to spend a lot in one sitting but then inevitably become frequent, repeat customers as a result. Try to keep plow horses available and stable in price for as long as possible to keep pulling those repeat customers in.

Star: high profit, high popularity

These are the items that may be unique to your establishment, maybe even a dish your restaurant is known for. You can increase the price (within reason), and people will still buy them. Why? Because they can’t get them anywhere else. This could be a version of a popular dish made with higher quality or more unique ingredients — like pork belly dim sum — or a dish that very few restaurants have on their menus — like poutine or roasted chicken.

Dog: Low profit, low popularity

These menu items take up space that could be allocated to more profitable items, and when they are ordered, they can reduce sales of your stars and puzzles – your more profitable offerings. Try to get dogs off your menu, as fast as possible. If for some reason, you absolutely must keep them on, add $1 or $2 to the price. Make them worth your while.

Puzzle: High profit, low popularity

These are those dishes that should sell better, but aren’t. The reasons for that can be a real mystery to you. Don’t take them off the menu. Just try to figure out how to sell more of them. Maybe take the price down a little, or give them better placement on your menu. If you play around with the recipes, remember not to damage their profitability, but only do things that will make the dishes sell better.

Puzzles are likely to benefit most from the following ideas for making your menu more profitable and attractive to repeat customers.

Spotlight your stars.

Displaying a signature spotlight on your menu is a great way to drive interest to a particular item that’s “highly recommended by our chef” (or accountants). Box that dish in to make it stand out among the others. This technique draws the eye in and can make the work of scanning a menu less arduous for the diners’ weary eyes. But like anything else, the more you use this trick, the less it means. Limit your spotlight items to one per menu category.

Occasionally, restaurants will also feature decoys — items that would so rarely get ordered that it seems silly to leave them on the menu, like a 72oz steak or a banana split with 12 kinds of ice cream served in a kitchen sink. So why feature them? Because these types of extreme menu offerings can get your customers’ brain moving. You might not order a steak as big as your head, but just reading about it might put you in the mood for a much more reasonably priced (and profitable) 20oz Prime Rib.

Draw customers in.

Yes, keeping your menu clean and easy to read means eliminating distractions. But like spotlight items, drawn graphics can help pull the customers’ eyes across your menu page when used sparingly.

The post How to Use Restaurant Menu Design to Increase Your Sales appeared first on Rewards Network.

• Hiring new restaurant staff
• Planning new restaurant menu ideas
• Expanding your drink list
• Opening your patio space

Download this free eBook today to develop your restaurant marketing plan for the summer months — and keep service moving as smoothly as ever.

Excerpt from Chapter 2:

Every savvy chef with their eye on the bottom line knows that adding seasonal menu items can be a huge benefit to a restaurant. From a customer perspective, those menu items are something really special, a dish that’s just for a limited time to celebrate the season — in this case, summer. And for the restaurant owner and chef, it’s a great way to build on your overall brand.

There is an endless variety of options for adjusting your menu for the season, but there are a few trends we consistently see pop up in preparation for summer.

It can be a very smart business move to take advantage of farmer’s markets in your area. You can get great fresh ingredients in season and then advertise to your customers that you proudly use local ingredients at your restaurant.

The catch is that you’ll also have to anticipate what the farmer’s market is going to have available. This is where building relationships with the vendors come in handy. If you get to know the local farmers and artisans at the market, you can start getting an idea ahead of time what produce will be like from month to month.

You can also tell farmer’s market vendors what you’re planning to do for your dishes and — knowing you want to buy from them — they can prepare in advance to have what you need. It all comes down to building those relationships at the beginning of the season and then doing a lot of networking throughout the summer and beyond. It’s not a short term solution – it’s long term investment in building professional relationships.

The summer season allows you to also explore new specials. After all, bringing appropriately seasonal flavors into your dishes can be especially enticing for guests. If you’re going to the farmer’s market to pick up ingredients for your special, make sure to be flexible with your plan if the produce you need isn’t there. If you have a yellow squash recipe but can’t find any, consider substituting with fresh green zucchini.

Also think of your specials in terms of “stars and plowhorses.” Star items are the ones with high popularity and high profitability. They’re ordered often and give you the most profit after food and labor cost. Obviously you want to see as many of these items on your menu as possible — and if a special ends up being one of those stars, consider incorporating it into your menu.

Plowhorses are the ones that are high in popularity but lower in profitability. For these items, see if you can adjust the ingredients so that they are more profitable without lowering overall quality (and lowering the popularity of the dish in the process). While testing out adjusted plowhorse items as specials, you can see if those adjustments can turn it into a star.

Salads are very popular in the summer when guests are looking for something fresh and light compared to the warm and heavy staples of the winter months. Look to seasonal produce like endive, butter lettuce, cucumbers, hearts of palm, and sugar snap peas to create summer salads that go beyond the iceberg lettuce standard.

Choosing seasonal vegetables is not only a good way to incorporate summer flavors into your menu, but they’re also likely to be the least expensive in summer because they are in season. Plus there’s the added benefit of adding the bright colors of those vegetables to your summer menu.

Don’t forget about fruit – it’s not just for traditional fruit salads. Blackberries, peaches, elderberries, Asian pear, and cherries are all fair game among your leafy greens, but they are far from the only fruit you can incorporate into special summer salad fare. And since it is a fruit, you can never go wrong with the many varieties of summer-picked tomatoes. Talk to your cooks, get creative with your salad choices, and see what happens!

The post How to Increase Your Summer Restaurant Sales appeared first on Rewards Network.

• New Customers
• Repeat Visits
• Increased Spend
• More Table Turns

Download this free eBook today to learn how you can influence each of these four factors to increase restaurant sales.

Excerpt from Introduction:

Earlier this year, something extraordinary happened in the food service industry. For the first time in history, consumer spending on dining out overtook that of grocery sales in the United States. This is incredible news for restaurants and bars yearning to increase sales, but there are challenges that come with this opportunity.

Restaurants have always had to face competition from other establishments with similar menus and price points in their area.

But now, they are also facing grocerants that offer eat-in experiences and other restaurants across the industry spectrum that blur the lines between quick service, fast casual, and even fine dining.

One thing has not changed, however. There are still only four ways to increase restaurant sales: increase the number of new customers, increase frequency of visit for your existing customers, increase the amount of spend per check, and increase the number of table turns or flow-through per day.

In this book, we’ll be looking at each one of these four methods for improving your bottom line, starting with attracting new customers.

Traditionally, restaurants — like the real estate and auto industry — have relied heavily on placements in print media to drive new customers.

Today, newspaper ads or free-standing inserts in local papers and magazines reach less consumers as subscription rates continue to plummet. Direct mail is still a common practice in most industries, but can easily get lost in the overwhelming amount of junk mail your potential customer receives on a daily basis.

And direct mail’s effectiveness is even lower when not sent frequently and consistently, and when not used in combination with a discount or value offer. This is critical to help you break through the thousands of messages consumers receive each day. The common thread for all of these practices is the large expense necessary to execute this type of marketing initiative, as well as the ROI. Often, your return on investment does not justify the time, resources, and energy needed to make a direct mail campaign truly successful.

Programs like Groupon® have recognized this shift, and have sought to offer an incentive to new customers by selling discounted digital deals that they have bulk purchased from restaurants and other businesses. What seemed like a sure driver of traffic at the height of its popularity eventually cost businesses a lot of money upfront (without driving return visits to compensate) and overwhelmingly attracted existing customers, not new ones.

What a lot of restaurants also learned was that offering discounts in bulk undermined the value of their menu, their service, and the experience they had to offer customers — both new and old.

So, how can you drive new customers without devaluing your brand through discounts?

The biggest hurdle for acquiring new customers is simply letting them know you exist. In today’s world, you must be proactive in reaching out to customers. And where are they? The Internet.

It’s long been understood that customers engage the Internet in their dining decisions at a much higher rate than in regard to other industries, with 92% of consumers having searched for a restaurant on their computer (and 81% on their mobile device). What’s more telling, however, is that 75% chose a restaurant based upon those search results.

This puts having an online presence at the top of your marketing needs. It’s true that assembling a website can be an expensive endeavor, but it’s also one of the best tools for establishing your brand, providing great information, and welcoming your new customer before they ever set foot into your restaurant.

And in 2015, it’s a consumer expectation to get an online preview of their dining experience at your restaurant, including up-to-date menus, beautiful photos of your food and environment and an easy way to contact you for reservations or to ask questions.

Building your website out is only half the battle, however. The real work is in letting potential customers know it’s there.

If your website is optimized for search, Google can do quite a bit of that work for you, but there are many ways to get your name out there and drive even more traffic through your doors.

Maintaining a social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram is one way to advertise through modern word-of-mouth the type of experience you have to offer. In our recent survey, 46% of consumers said recommendations from others, both on- and offline, was their primary method for finding restaurants.

Sharing photos of your specials and talking up your most popular dishes is a great way to drive interest. Also, make sure your listing at Yelp or other socially-driven consumer sites is up-to-date and complete with photos and content that will stand out in a sea of search results.

*All statistics footnoted in eBook appendix.

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