Increasing Customers to Your Local Restaurant Business Online

Whether you own a pizza shop in Atlanta, GA. or a Mexican Food Restaurant in Oceanside, CA. you will find the same challenges every other local business owner has. And this challenge will be to do whatever it takes to entice customers in your area to eat at your restaurant instead of your competitors. Other than making great food which I’m sure you have, here are some great tips that will help your local restaurant business tremendously.

1.) Capture Each Of Your Customers Contact Details

If you want your restaurant to be the King Tut Restaurant in your locale, make sure to give each customer a customer satisfaction card along with their bill. Each customer who fills this out will go into your online follow-up database. Make sure you ask for their Name, Email, Phone, Mobile Phone and complete address at a minimum. These cards don’t have to be fancy, but they should be CMYK and done by a professional printer. Also to increase the response rate offer something free like a soda next time they come in for filling it out.

2.) Build an Internet Mailing List

As an incentive to any subscriber who chooses to join your mailing list, offer a deep discount or something free to get them through your doors for the first time. An example might be a 25 cent coupon to redeem a soda. This way it doesn’t cost you an economic loss to give them one but they think they are getting a steal. If you live in a mid sized city chances are the majority of people in your city don’t even know you exist or they get so busy in their daily lives that they just pass on by your restaurant without giving it a second thought. Your job as the marketer is to make everyone within a 15 mile radius give your restaurant a second thought.

3.) Offer Weekly Raffles

Allow your customers to drop their business cards into a fish bowl right by the front cash register. Offer them a weekly drawing and give away one free meal for two each week randomly to just one lucky person. This will allow you to keep building your internal mailing list larger and larger. The benefit of this is that you can now start getting creative with your offers and start offering specials to incentivize more people to visit on slower days.

4.) Buy 10 and Get One Meal Free Punch Cards

Some restaurants are giving our punch cards these days. Each time the customer visits your restaurant and purchases food the manager or employee punches out one of the numbers on the card. Once all 10 numbers are punched out, the customer will turn in this card next time they visit the restaurant for a free meal. I’ve seen quite a few Oriental Buffet’s doing this very successfully.

5.) Offer Free Magnets To Customers On Their Way Out

I’ve only seen a few local business owners do this and I’m not sure why since these are so powerful. You can purchase 500 of them these days for $80.00 so why not give them out. Customers might forget about business cards buried in their pockets but they won’t forget about magnets, they will see your business each time they get food out of their refrigerator. Plus people like collecting magnets so why not use that opportunity to place your offer in front of them?

6.) Offer Extras like HDTV and Pool

The cost of HDTV has gone way down over the last few years when they were very popular. You can get them now for just $200 to $300. The benefits of offering TV to your customers while they are dining in your establishment is it will keep them there longer which means that they will on average spend more money while they are there. You don’t have to let the customers pick the channel of course. If you run a sports pub you might play ESPN. Or if you run most other types of restaurants you can play CNN or some other news stations. News Stations tend to be neutral and cater to all audiences and genres. If you have room you should include a pool table, foosball table and arcade games. These are also known to keep people around your restaurant longer which means more revenue for you. And in many cases these items themselves pull in additional revenue.

7.) Decorate Your Walls With Happy Customer Photos

Another cool idea for creating more of a home feel to your restaurant is to take pictures of people eating there with their permission of course. Then tape or pin these pictures to one of your walls or every wall. Doing this goes a long way in creating that community feeling and giving your restaurant credibility among the local residents which is where a vast majority of your business will come from. You can even add captions at the bottom of these pictures or on the wall right under the pictures. Some people even fasten these photos or glue them on the wall diagonally giving the collage or wallpaper effect.

8.) Create a Facebook Fan Page

Most of your customers whether you realize it or not are looking on the web to find you before they visit you to eat. This means that you need to be on Facebook and have your own Facebook Fan Page.

There’s many other ways a local restaurant owner can get leads like using Mobile Marketing. Get your Free Consultation and Website Analysis and we can help your business implement all of these things.