sales promotion objectives and using sales promotion in food and beverages industry CRM

sales promotion objectives and using sales promotion in food and beverages industry CRM

List sales promotion objectives as below

Increase sales volume

Speed up the sales for slow moving products

Check the flutuation in sales

Attract new customers

Leunch new product

Encoutage repeat purchase

Clearance of exxcessive inventors

Motivate

Encourage delersa to participate in isplay and sales contest

Gain advantege shelf sapce

Increase store traffic

Improve relationsip with dealers

Block competitors moves

Motivate sales force

Supplements advertising and personal selling effoets

Defelect customers attention from price

Restaurant Special Promotions

Host a Restaurant Tasting Dinner

A specialty tasting dinner offers customers a chance to try a special dinner menu, paired with a series of wine or other spirits. The menu can be either prix fixe – with a certain number of courses offered, or a limited a la carte menu. With the help of a sommelier, you can offer customized wine and food pairings that will wow customers. This is an ideal promotion for a slow time of year, to bring in extra business

Participate in Restaurant Week

Restaurant Week varies from place to place. The general concept is that local restaurants partner with local tourist organizations or chambers of commerce to promote a week of lunch and dinner specials.

Other partners may include local businesses, banks and food vendors. Restaurants offer reduced prices for a prix fixe menu, the idea being that what they lose in check averages they gain in sales volume. Some restaurants report increased volume as high as 40% during Restaurant Week. Restaurant week takes place throughout the year, all over the country.

Offer Holiday Specials

Many special restaurant promotions capitalize on holidays and other special events. For example Mothers Day, New Year’s Eve, and Valentine’s Day are each busy days in for the restaurant industry. With anticipated crowds of customers all wanting to dine at roughly the same time, restaurants need to be even more organized than normal. With a little planning you can avoid problems like overbooking reservations and understaffing. As part a holiday special promotion, your restaurant can entice customers with two-for-one deals on Valentines and New Year’s Eve or other promotions like moms get a free dessert on Mother’s Day. Read more about holiday restaurant specials.

Participate in Community Fundraisers

Another special promotion that many restaurant stake advantage of is fundraising. A restaurant can partner with a local nonprofit organization or community group, to host a dinner, with part of the proceeds going to charity. Going out to dinner is an easy and fun way for people to donate money to a worthy cause, while at the same time trying out your restaurant. The extra (often free) advertising that comes with fundraising events is good for business

Ideas include charity auctions, dinner and dancing or other live entertainment, a murder mystery dinner (great for a Halloween promotion) or a scholarship fundraising dinner

Offer Catering Services

Along with special promotional ideas, many restaurants offer both on and off-premise catering. Restaurant catering is ideal for the holidays, parties, receptions and meetings. Since your restaurant is already has a commercial kitchen for cooking and a well trained staff, why not offer catering? It is a great way to expand your customer base and enhance your restaurant’s reputation. There are many types of catering options that restaurants can offer, including food stations, buffets and plated meals.

Specialty catering equipment includes banquet tables, chaffing dishes and extra place settings. Read more about how to start catering at your restaurant

Using CRM for Restaurants to Increase Customer Retention

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a term that refers to practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the goal of improving business relationships with customers, assisting in customer retention and driving sales growth. CRM systems are designed to compile information on customers across different channels -- or points of contact between the customer and the company -- which could include the company's website, telephone, live chat, direct mail, marketing materials and social media. CRM systems can also give customer-facing staff detailed information on customers' personal information, purchase history, buying preferences and concerns

Relationship building is key, it can make the difference between a one-time customer and those that return on a regular basis. These days there are plenty of CRM solutions out there that cater specifically to the restaurant industry and have changed the game significantly in this highly competitive arena.

1.    Build a customer database 
The first thing a CRM system does is gather information and help the restaurant owner get to know their customer.

1. Customer contact details
2. Frequency of visits
3. Preferences on meals11
4. Average spend per visit

When linked to the restaurant’s point of sale software, it can provide valuable reports and analysis on:

1. Most popular menu items
2. Items that are not selling
3. Busiest days/ nights and help identify the reasons why
4. If it is a nationally franchised or chain of restaurants, it can provide the franchisor with information on which regions are performing better than others.

This becomes the basis for communication with the customer, helps track customer trends and feeds into marketing plans. 

2.    Menu engineering
At the heart of a successful restaurant is its food, the options available on the menu too should match customers' tastes and preferences and its quality should be superior.That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?

However, even if food is good quality, every restaurant has meals that sell phenomenally well and those that don’t. The restaurateur needs to be clued up on this in order to be more profitable. A Cloud CRM Software which is linked to the point of sale software and any other system will generate sales information on the menu products in four ways:

1. Popular and highly profitable items
2. Profitable but unpopular items
3. Popular but unprofitable items
4. Unpopular and unprofitable items

The first and last points are a no-brainer. Popular and highly profitable items should remain on the menu – don’t fix what’s not broke. Unpopular and unprofitable items need to be scrapped from the menu. The challenge is in finding creative ways to improve the two in the middle. For popular but unprofitable items, this could mean substituting one or two ingredients with a cheaper alternative without compromising quality and taste. For profitable but unpopular items, more aggressive marketing may increase sales or tweaking the recipe could make it more appealing.

This type of information can also lead to product innovation. Assessing the type of meals that are popular can lead to designing new menu products.

3. Strategic marketing campaigns

So, you now have a CRM system in place and you’ve gathered information about the customer and scrutinized the menu. What’s next? Marketing is the next logical step. Armed with the insights your CRM solution provides, you can start developing strategic promotional campaigns. In addition, CRM enables you to segment and target specific groups of customers such as seniors, adults, students and kids.

You can identify quiet days/ nights and run a special to help attract customers. With the help of your CRM software you can communicate directly with the customer via email or text message.

Don’t only offer discounts, but look at adding value to the customer. For example, offer a free dessert one night of the week or run an in-store competition. Send a coupon or voucher via text message that the customer can redeem on their next visit. Promote a theme evening with small giveaways and freebies. Competitions and theme evenings create a vibe and are a lot of fun. This makes your restaurant not only a place to eat at, but a place to enjoy an experience! Why do kids love going out to eat? Because it’s more than just a Happy Meal, it’s a fun adventure. –

4. Loyalty programs

Following on from point 3, loyalty programs use the data that has been collected and take marketing one step further. What does CRM stand for – customer relationship management. Loyalty and reward programs are what CRM is made for.

Loyalty programs can track the frequency of a customer’s visits using big data, their meal preferences, what time of the week or month they tend to visit, their average spend per visit as well as their total spend since being a member of the loyalty program. These provide the optimum platform to interact and engage with the customer. Special individual offers can be targeted for customers on the loyalty programme. Reward loyal customers with a free gift, send a birthday wish and offer a discount. Keep in regular touch with customers via email or text message. This makes the customer feel special and they love that they get something out of the deal

5. Customer retention

What is the ultimate goal? To make the customer’s experience with your restaurant a unique one that keeps them coming back! In addition to all the advantages a CRM solution gives you mentioned above, it will also provide a couple of other useful functions to promote a positive relationship with the customer.

1. Customer feedback and suggestions: Rather than just a one-sided conversation, i.e. the restaurant communicating with the customer, this is a tool for the customer to speak to the restaurant.

2. Customer complaints: Don’t lose a customer over a badly handled complaint, most people are quick to spread the word about bad service to at least 10 or more other people.