Looking for a new promotion to attract new customers? Here’s a simple promotion any bar or restaurant owner can implement on a shoestring budget, that’s intereactive, and that their customers will love!
Links Mentioned In Podcast:
BARS Inner Circle Membership – Downloads Of Email & Facebook Ads Mentioned – Aug Newsletter
Transcript
Today I want to share with you a new promotional idea I came up with that any bar or restaurant owner in the country can implement. No matter where you live. No matter what type of establishment you have.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I like to come with totally new, innovative ways to attract new customers and get existing customers in the door. The way I typically do this is by looking at a monthly calendar and looking into non traditional holidays.
June 1st is considered to be “Flip A Coin Day.” So I thought about how I could take this special holiday and turn it into a weekly promotion that would boost sales.
Here’s what I came up with and going to test at one of my bars. Instead of calling this promotion “Flip A Coin” I’m going to call it “Flip Your Tab.”
There’s many ways to make this work but first let me tell you what I’m going to do to test this out first. I’m first going to try this on one specific day before I commit to doing this weekly. I want to see that people like this first.
When people come in, right before they pay their tab, they will be able to flip a quarter. If it lands on heads, they will get 25% off of their food. If it lands on tails, they will only get 10% off their food.
As you can imagine, there’s several ways you can run this. For example, heads could be a nice size discount and tails could be nothing at all. You could choose that both are discounts as I’m doing. You could also do this where heads is a discount and tails is too, but tails is for a bounce back offer of what the heads discount would be.
I can keep going and going but think of your business model and what offers seemed to work best for you in the past. What kind of value can you give that still makes you a profit but also gives customers a reason to want to come in to try to win a nice little incentive.
How To Kick
Off The Promotion
What I’m going to do is test this out for just one day first. I’m going to send out a e-mail to my e-mail list and I’m going to run some Facebook ads ONLY to my email list and see what kind of response we get. I will also ask people after they flip the coin and get their discount if we did this on a weekly basis, would it drive them back in more often on that day. By knowing this, it’ll give you a good idea whether this is something you should spend more time on.
If you’re a BARS Inner Circle Member, you’ll be getting access to the e-mail I use and the Facebook ads I created in the August newsletter so you can take them and apply them to your business if you wish.
To get the most exposure with this promotion, once you decide if this will be a weekly promotion, you could have your bartender or server take a video of the person flipping the coin and showing the results. Then post that video to Facebook. Or ask the person they are with to take a video and post to Facebook, Instagram, or Snap Chat.
What I Believe Will Make
This A Success For Anyone
People LOVE the chance to win things and when you can add in a just a little piece of interaction that they get to have, people have FUN with it. It makes their experience much more fun.
Keep in mind, if you use weak offers like get 10% off if heads and nothing if it’s tails, you’ll get very few people. So to get the best results, create a discount that delivers value but still makes you a good profit. Have a strategy in place with upsells or ways to drive that customer back in right away.
If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, please leave them below on the blog page
Nick, love the idea. How have the results been? We just bought a restaurant in January and opening April 14th. Would love this as a grand opening promotion. Thoughts?
Tim, results have been ok. WE did it for a month or so but then changed up to doing a meat raffle after getting some feedback from customers and the meat raffle has been killing it! People LOVE to win stuff.
I will go back to this again, just at a different time in the year. What you should do is a pre launch / lead capture promotion before you open. Get people signed up to your VIP / Loyalty.
If you haven’t read this report – https://barrestaurantsuccess.com/100-80-20-marketing-formula/ I would definitely check it out.