Restaurant Marketing Strategies

Restaurant Marketing Strategies

Restaurant Marketing Strategies

Restaurant Marketing Strategies

Restaurant Marketing Strategies Blog

Free Online Restaurant Marketing Tips and Information


Think of Different Ways to Promote Your Restaurant

WaitressWithBusinesscard.jpgThere are so many different ways to promote your restaurant, what are you waiting for? Engaging in a public relations campaign, an advertising campaign or a direct marketing campaign can all be fun if you remember that the concept of eating out is supposed to be a great social occasion. Don't look at this as a chore, but rather as one of the most pleasant jobs associated with running your business.

If you have a good reputation and some loyal customers who you may also be on rather friendly terms with, why not engage them to help you promote your restaurant? Recruit customers to write reviews, contribute blog posts, "tweet" or place posts on their Facebook pages from time to time. This is a very effective way of getting the word out on the street and can be cost effective for you - just give them free appetizers or desserts.

You should go out of your way to get the e-mail address of your customer. This may mean that you have to give away something valuable, a two for one or something to entice them to give you the address. E-mail marketing is surely one of the best ways to promote your restaurant as once they have agreed to receive information from you this opens up a whole world of possibilities.

When you are in the possession of e-mail addresses for your clients, remember to find out their birth dates or any other special occasions. Set up a system to automatically fire out an e-mail a few days before these occasions and offer a freebie to get them to come in on the special day. The chances are they will be celebrating with friends and this could represent a nice little party for you.

Think about themes. Do a little research online and you will find out that there are special occasions, holidays, "gimmick" days, religious days - some special occasion every week. If you are creative, you will come up with ideas to link your restaurant, a menu item or some co-promotion to create interest in the neighborhood.

Promote your restaurant with a PR campaign, especially if you are launching a new menu, welcoming a new master chef or engaging in a charitable affair of some kind. Press release distribution is relatively straightforward and cost effective these days and will invariably result in exposure for you if well presented.

Consider how many local newspapers, radio stations or other media outlets you have in your location. Pick up a copy of the publication or tune into the radio station as appropriate. If you cannot see any evidence of a food critic or a restaurant expert, it is time for you to really promote your restaurant by getting in touch with the editor and offering your services for free. Take time to show him or her that you are an expert in your field and they will turn to you for any food related questions or news items that they have.

Social media is the buzzword these days and anyone who has a business should be involved. Promote your restaurant by creating a Facebook page in the name of your business. Start a blog and keep it maintained with regular menu items ideas, articles about types of food and so on. The secret here is to make sure the program is maintained regularly.

Happy Meals,
Jose L Riesco
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Your Restaurant Struggles Are Not Unique!







Dear restaurateur,

Do you sometimes feel like you have unique problems running your restaurant?

Do you see other restaurants fuller than yours and you are wondering what are you doing wrong or what are they doing right that you could do as well?

Do you feel like your restaurant is unique and you have unique problems that nobody else in the industry has?

You'll be surprised if I tell you that your problems, desires, wishes, aspirations, setbacks, losses and issues are not unique.

Most restaurateurs share the same problems and issues; this is what it makes us, makes you special and, at the same time, part of a larger community. Sometimes the issues that seem or feel more personal, are the ones that are the most generic.

You see? Running a successful restaurant is not easy. You struggle every day with a million things that could (and would) get wrong: machines break, your employees get sick... or leave you when you need them the most, sometimes they slack or are not nice to your customers, some days are almost empty and some totally full for no reason, you work hard and then receive criticism from ungrateful customers, you spend money in marketing but it doesn't seem to bring you many people...

You see? Running a successful restaurant is not easy. You struggle every day with a million things that could (and would) get wrong: machines break, your employees get sick... or leave you when you need them the most, sometimes they slack or are not nice to your customers, some days are almost empty and some totally full for no reason, you work hard and then receive criticism from ungrateful customers, you spend money in marketing but it doesn't seem to bring you many people...

Do you recognize any of these issues? You should, because they are common to most restaurants. Yes, it is true that there are some very successful restaurants that people love and are always full, but these are a minority in the general dinning landscape, and their fortunes are sometimes volatile since often their success brings complacency... Customers are very picky and soon they will look for something better (or more fashionable) to try.

So what can you do to be more profitable? To be more successful? To have your restaurant full of happy customers?

Actually the answer is very simple:

YOU MUST INCREASE YOUR EMPATHY FOR YOUR CLIENTS



Greater Empathy = Greater Profits!



There is a direct correlation between empathy and profits. But before I get to this again, let me clarify for you the difference between marketing and sales. Although this may be obvious for many of you, I know that sometimes both concepts get mixed.

Marketing is the activity aimed to bring people to your restaurant. Sales is the act of bringing your food and drinks to your costumers so they can consume them and pay for them. It is that simple.

Remember always that the goal of marketing is to make selling superfluous, or at least as easy as it can. Marketing always precedes selling. If your marketing if effective, your sales are easier and more profitable since your customers are already in the mood to consume your food and drinks.

On the other hand, if your marketing is ineffective, not matter how good your food and service is, nobody will go to your place to try it out. This is where many restaurateurs fail. They offer excellent sales, but they don't have the appropriate marketing vehicles to bring people to their place.

So what do marketing and sales have to do with empathy? Actually a lot! You need to use empathy in your marketing and in your sales.

Your marketing must appeal to your prospects emotions. They must feel like going to your place is special, and you and your employees will make them have a great time.

Your sales must also try to make your customers experience at your restaurant a unique and emotional journey.

I know that many of you are thinking that I am being too metaphysical and food is just food, but most of the people going to a restaurant are looking forward to have a great time, not just to satisfy their bellies.

Always try to be empathic with your customers and anticipate their needs and uniqueness. You will make them feel special and in return, they will come back to your place and will tell everybody how wonderful your restaurant is.

It is that simple.

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco
www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter: www.twitter.com/jlriesco
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Ways To Increase Restaurant Sales In a Down Economy

Just a quick note to announce that WeeklyInterview has posted an interview with me that they made a few days ago. The title of the Interview is "Ways To Increase Restaurant Sales In a Down Economy"

You can read it here: http://weeklyinterview.com/?p=145

By the way, the price of the Restaurant Birthday Cub will go up from $49.99 to $69.99 in January 15th. so if you didn't take advantage of this opportunity you are missing a GREAT marketing investment. It works like charm.

I would suggest that you read the article "Make Your Customers Feel Special on Their Birthdays" that I published in my site. You can find it here: http://myrestaurantmarketing.com/articles/restaurant_birthday_marketing.html

Also, you can get more information about the Restaurant Birthday Club and MVP program here: http://myrestaurantmarketing.com/products/restaurant_birthday.html

Happy Meals,
Jose L Riesco
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New Year's Restaurant Marketing Resolutions

Resolutions.pngFirst of all, Happy 2010 to all of you.

As the new year starts, many of you are making resolutions. Perhaps your restaurant is not very full, business is slow and you could do with many more customers, or perhaps you just want to improve your business: streamline operations, reduce expenses and improve your marketing.

Here are some ideas for your new year's resolutions:

√ Do you have a restaurant website? If not, this is the time to create one. More than 70% of your potential customers are looking for restaurants online and they will miss yours if you are not there.

√ If you have a website, this is a good time to check that all your information is updated. Do all your links work? (You'll be surprised how many times I wanted to get in touch with a restaurant via the Contact Us menu just to find that it does't work.) Do you accept online reservations? Do you capture your client's email to follow up with your list? Is your site easy to navigate and without annoying music and flash animations? Are your menus and prices up to date? Are you still promoting last year's events?

√ Are you using Social Media to promote your business? Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are free to use and can keep your place fresh in your customer's and potential customer's minds.

√ Do you have a way to capture your customers birthdays and anniversaries? If you don't, you should. Birthdays are very special for most people and they usually never celebrate them alone. If you do, are you doing your homework and sending them a special invitation to celebrate these special occasions with their friends and families at your restaurant?

√ Are you tracking the results of all your marketing investments? If not, this is a great time to start doing this. If you can't track the result of a marketing investment, then cancel it. You don't want to be wasting money in something that you don't know even if it works. Typical examples of wasted marketing investments are ads in newspapers and magazines (at least that you can track how many customers do they bring to your place), Yellow Pages (who uses the Yellow Pages anymore?, and specially who uses them to decide the restaurants where they should go?, Yes, that's right, nobody. People are searching online nonadays), radio ads, etc.

√ Do you have a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)? Something that identifies your restaurant and differentiates it from any other restaurant. If you don't, you should think about creating one. If you do, are you using it in all your marketing materials? Is your staff aware of your USP?

√ Are you training your staff to be client-centric? Your clients are your most important asset. Not you, not your place, not even your delicious food. If you don't have clients coming to your place, nothing else matters. Make sure that your staff is fully trained to deal with all kinds of customers so that they become clients, love your place and write rave reviews about your restaurant in all the restaurant directories and social media places. Happy clients are the best marketing that you can have. Unhappy clients will be very willing to talk bad about your place and will have an impact on hundreds, perhaps thousands of people reading their reviews. Never argue with your clients and think of any complementary food to make them happy as a marketing investment, not a loss.

√ Are you reading what people say about your restaurant in directories like Yelp.com, UrbanSpoon.com, CitySearch.com, etc.? Even if sometimes it is difficult to swallow all the negative reviews (and most people only bother to write when they are angry or they had a bad experience), they can help you identify areas for improvement. For example, if you have many people complaining about your service, then obviously you have a problem with your servers; same thing with your food, ambience, music, etc. Try to be positive and use the feedback as a way to improve your restaurant business. A continuos improvement process will gradually eliminate the bad reviews and bring the good ones. This will bring more people to your place.

There are many other resolutions that you can set for this year, but the most important resolution of all is to take some action. Many times, restaurateurs know that they need to change or improve things but they are so caught up in the daily operations that they don't have the time to change anything.

Remember, if you keep on working the same way, you will get the same results. Only changing and improving your marketing and operations will bring more customers to your place. Complaining about the economy could make you feel better but, believe me, even in this poor market conditions many restaurants are thriving. Is yours one of them?

You can find many free ideas and information about marketing restaurant in my website.

Happy 2010.

Jose L Riesco

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com
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The Gift of Restaurant Feedback

customer-feedback.jpgGetting feedback about your restaurant is, perhaps, one of the best ways to improve your business. After all, the people bringing you the money are telling you what they like and what they don't about your restaurant.

Giving feedback requires time and energy so most of your dinners won't bother telling you about your food, your service and/or your ambience. Only when clients have very strong opinions (positive or negative) they will take the time to give you their feedback so you better pay attention to what they have to say.

It is true that most of the feedback that you'll receive will be negative. People are mostly moved by emotions and nothing motivates a person to act more than expressing their feelings about why their dinning experience was ruined by your food, service, ambience, or some combination of them...

I've just published a new article in my website that talks about this issue. You can read the full article at my website: The Gift Of Restaurant Feedback

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco

Follow me in Twitter: www.twitter.com/jlriesco


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80/20 vs. 4: Restaurant Marketing By The Numbers

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By Greg McGuire

The Pareto Principle has long been hailed as the Holy Grail of marketing, the one rule by which all marketing efforts succeed or fail. The principle itself is pretty simple: 20% of your customers drive 80% of your sales. There’s always a core group of loyal customers who not only spend money in your restaurant, they bring their friends, give glowing reviews at dinner parties, and otherwise provide a vital linchpin in your money making machine.

Figuring out who those 20% are can be a full time job, and the logic has long held that if you find them, and target them effectively, you’ll be well on your way. But as the Information Age has matured, so has the wealth of tools available to marketers, and therefore the size of the groups you can target has gotten much smaller. Some marketers have even begun to parse groups of customers down to what some are calling the 4% factor, or specific offers that have a high conversion rate among 4% of your customers.

So how does this apply to restaurants? Well, for starters, restaurants are a business, just like any other. And as a business, restaurants have products that need to be sold to the right customer. Every day your restaurant has the opportunity to learn more about your customers: how often they come in, how much they spend, what they order, etc.

The more you know, the better you can target your promotions and marketing. Too often restaurants take a shotgun approach to their marketing campaigns – blanket advertising in local media outlets and generalized coupons (20% off your order, etc.). That strategy used to be enough. But as more restaurants compete for the same customers, aging marketing approaches are simply not going to work anymore.

Here are some tips to bring your restaurant marketing strategy into the 21st century:

Know thy customer. You’ve probably heard this one before, but it has never been more true. The main difference is that you have many more ways to get to know your customer today that simply didn’t exist before. For restaurants specifically, consider some strategies to learn more about your customers:

  • Hold a raffle/door prize event.Customers who enter must fill out a card with their email address, favorite menu item, really anything you want to know about them.

  • Use an email marketing campaign to engage customers and collect information about them.

  • Conduct surveys, either electronically or on paper in your restaurant.



Use coupons to learn more about your customers – if you can collect an email when a customer redeems a coupon for a specific menu item, then you can use that information to target them for specific types of future promotions

Leverage thy knowledge. Now that you’ve put some effort into collecting information about your customers, you need to leverage that information to your advantage. Use the 4% factor to separate customers into specific groups with particular tastes. Then hit those groups with specially tailored promotions made just for them. The goal is to get your response rate (i.e. conversion rate) through the roof.

Engage thy followers. Targeting small groups of loyal customers should generate an enthusiastic response. And when customers respond, you should be poised to engage them and solidify your rightful place as one of their favorite brands. The tools you have available to you today make customer engagement even easier. Experiment with different avenues until you find the social media that works for you.

Gauge and repeat. The idea is that these small groups you find through your marketing campaign will respond at much higher rates than a traditional (and usually more expensive) marketing campaign. You’ll only know for sure if you gauge response. Use coupon codes and other ways to measure who’s biting on what, and then modify and improve your campaign until you have it honed down to a high performance machine.

The good news is that running a 4% campaign will probably be much cheaper than a traditional shotgun blitz. The bad news is that it takes some significant time investments and more than a little trial and error. For those willing to put the time in however, the gains can be huge.




Greg McGuire blogs about the foodservice industry at The Back Burner, which is written by the employees of Tundra Specialties, a company specializing in restaurant equipment and food service supplies.
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Restaurant Email Marketing or Restaurant Social Media?

email.png
Last week I've posted a blog in FohBoh titled Restaurant Email Marketing and to be honest, I was surprised about how many heated comments it got.

You can read it here:

http://www.fohboh.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1411008:BlogPost:338824&page=1

Obviously restaurant Email marketing obviously strikes a chord equally with marketing experts and restaurateurs. One of the comments was very interesting. Brett mentioned that "True interaction and exchanges of information happen on social networks."

His point is that email is intrusive while in social network media people chose to follow other people (or a business) and therefore the information is shared voluntarily.

This is not totally right since people can also unsubscribe easily from email lists if the content is not to their liking.

The difference between email marketing and social media marketing is that email marketing is a push marketing (people receive your communication) while social media is a pull marketing (people need to connect and check what's going on).

So which one is best? The answer is both:

Email marketing is really appropriated to send a message to your customers that you want to make sure they receive (like an important event or announcement).

Social media marketing, on the other hand, is better for posting general news, photos of your restaurant, staff or dishes, etc. and in general for keeping your restaurant fresh in your customers' memory.

Use both with moderation and always post interesting information and you will accomplish to keep your customers happy and informed.

Happy meals,

Jose L Riesco

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

PD: I've updated my website with a ton of free marketing information, resources and ideas. Check it out!
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The Best Restaurant Marketing In the World

happy_diners.jpg Restaurant owners and managers often spend quite a lot of money in marketing, trying to bring new customers to their restaurant with mixed results.

However, that obsession with bringing new customers often diverts the attention from their core business.

Let’s face it; before you start spending hundreds (or thousands) of dollars a month trying to bring new customers to your restaurant, you should focus on your core competences, making sure that you can deliver an excellent dining experience to your clients.

Restaurants should show their commitment to excellence in four basic parameters:

√ Quality of their food

√ Excellence of their service

√ Cleanliness of their place

√ Agreeable, beautiful, unique, and/or attractive ambience

If you can’t deliver in all these categories, then perhaps you can still bring new customers to your restaurant using smart and targeted marketing. However, many of these people won’t come back to eat at your place, so you will have to keep on investing over and over in new marketing vehicles to always attract new customers.

Instead, try to take a hard look at your current offering. Do you deliver great food with excellent customer service in a clean and attractive place? If so, great, you are ready now to promote your business.

However, if you think that you are missing in one or more of the four categories, you should focus your energies on improving them.

These are some basic things you can do to improve your core business:

Changing or simplifying your menus. Sometimes less is more and your kitchen staff can focus all their energies on your signature dishes and your servers will know better the menus. If your cooks can deliver great quality food, then it’s time to hire new more skilled cooks.

Training your staff by switching all the emphases to customer service and satisfaction. Setup clear guidelines about how to deal with unhappy clients.

Making sure that your restaurant is spotless. There is not excuse for less than a clean place where people go to eat. If your place is not clean enough, change your cleaning service (if you hire one), or ask your in-house people to clean better and review thoroughly after they clean to make sure that the place is spotless.

Creating a nice ambiance. Sometimes, a fresh coat of paint and some accessories is all you need to give your place a fresh and pleasant look.

But the most important aspect of all, is a total commitment from the management to deliver to your clients a great dining experience. This is what separates the great restaurants from the mediocre ones.

I encourage you now to go to the main restaurant review sites (www.yelp.com, www.citysearch.com www.metaflavor.com, www.menusnearu.com, etc.) and read the reviews that people wrote about your restaurant.

Sometimes this is a revelation because as the proud owner, you think that everything is fine with your place, and then you read some nasty reviews from disgruntled customers. I know that these reviews are hard to swallow but you must think about these reviews as a great opportunity for you to know your weak spots and improve your business.

Do they mainly complain about your food? Your service? Do you have tables that people really don’t like (perhaps no very well located…)?

These should be clues for you about what are your restaurant’s weaknesses and try to improve upon them.

Many times, the problems are related to consistency. A great review from one day becomes a horrible review the next because the dish was wrong, or the service poor. This is also a clue that you must set up processes that everybody should follow to make sure that things work as expected.

Of course, all the processes and safeguards in the world won’t assure you that mistakes won’t be made; after all, the restaurant business is a people’s business and people will make mistakes, count on it. So, what can you do to make your clients happy? You should make sure that people are adequately compensated for any wrongdoing that spoils their dining experience.

Having a compensation plan for your clients is the best marketing strategy that you can implement in your restaurant. After all, happy clients will write enthusiastic reviews about your place. These glowing reviews will be read by many prospects in the many restaurant review sites, and they will bring you many more happy clients.

Also, once you have solid systems in place to assure your customer's satisfaction, you can implement a formalized restaurant referral systems to bring back over and over your increasingly happy crowd.

If you focus on your core business and you always exceed your customers’ expectations, you won’t have to worry about marketing anymore.

Your clients will become your best marketing and sales force. Their testimonials will have ten times more credibility and power than any fancy advertisement or marketing campaign that your restaurant can run.

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco
www.myrestaurantmarketing.com
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People Are Searching Online to Find Restaurants

How important is your restaurant's web presence?



According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, in 2008 over 72.5% of the U.S. population was online (that’s OVER 220 MILLION Americans), and 70% of them use the Internet everyday. This means that most of your customers are looking for restaurants online, and many of them use Google to find a good place to eat.



I don't know if you are aware that Google has recently introduced a local search feature that detects your location and shows local results instead of global ones. What this means is that, for example, if somebody wants to find a Mexican restaurant near their home, they just have to type "Mexican restaurant" in the Google bar...



LittleSnapper.png




...and Google will show them a list with the top 10 Mexican restaurants nearby. No need for them to even tell Google where they are located. Google knows.



Now, if you happen to own the ONLY Mexican restaurant in town, you probably don't need to worry about showing up in the top-ten list. However, chances are that your restaurant is not the only one in your category so you better start working on your web presence or people won't find you online!



In addition of showing the list with the names of the top 10 restaurants, Google also displays their websites, their phone numbers, and the number of reviews that people made. It is just one click away to read what people have to say about your restaurant:





Safari.png




So, OK now you get that you should show up in the Google searches when somebody looks for your restaurant’s cuisine, now what should you do to make sure that your restaurant shows up in the top-ten list?



To start, you should make sure that your restaurant has a decent website. This is a basic requirement. It is not enough to show up in Citysearch, Metaflavor or Yelp. If you’ve noticed, all the restaurants in my search have their own websites.



Also, your website should be informative and very easy to navigate. It should contain the following components:



✔ Your complete menu with prices



✔ Photos of your dishes



✔ Your location: address (with a map), and phone number



✔ Hours of operations



✔ Information about other services: catering, special events, cooking classes, etc.



✔ The option of making online reservations directly from your site (very important for many people)



✔ An online form to capture your prospect's name, email, birthdays and anniversaries (essential requirement to email them promotions and attract them to your place)



✔ Press releases, testimonials of happy clients



✔ etc.


In addition, you should promote your site so that it scores high in the Google natural search results. How do you do that? This is a whole new topic (it is called SEO) but basically you should have as many cross references to your site as possible from other sites and social networks: blogs, reviews, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.

You can sign for a free account in Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and start blogging about your place. You can write about your dishes, your staff, your wines, or beers, about geography (country, region) and culture of your restaurant’s food or any other information that could be interesting for your clients.

Of course this blog will have links to your website. You can even link this blog so that it also publishes to your website at the same time…

Also, open a free Facebook account and populate it with content. Link it to your website. Open another one in MySpace. Do the same with Twitter and tweet away information, discounts, timely coupons, etc. Don’t forget to point people to your website as well in Twitter.

There are many other ways to promote your website. I will cover some in future blogs.

In the meantime, get to work.

✔ Google your restaurant’s cuisine and check if your website shows up in the top 10.

✔ Review your current site and start improving it with all the necessary requirements to make it attractive, useful and easy to navigate.

✔ Open an account in Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and start a blog. Link it to your website.

✔ If you don’t already have, open accounts in the various social networks and create your restaurant page.

✔ Open an account in Twitter (or tweet away if you have one).

Link all of your offerings back to your website and in a few weeks, check again. You should start showing up in the top 10 restaurants for your category. This is what you want. This will attract you new customers.

Happy meals,

Jose L Riesco

http://www.myrestaurantmarketing.com




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Simplify Your Life: Optimize Your Restaurant Operations (1st part)

Restaurant_Process.pngThis is the second blog of the Simplify Your Life series. The main concept behind these series is to give you some ideas to help you simplify your workload (and your life!) AND in the process, improve your business.

I my previous blog, I mentioned that you need to reduce the number of items in your menu. In this one, I will talk about simplifying your operations.

Operations in a restaurant are all the actions that happen from the moment that you open your doors in the morning, until the moment when you close them at night.

For simplicity purposes, I will split the operations in two separate components:

1. Your front of the house: whatever is visible to your customers.

2. You back of the house operations: what happens behind your restaurant doors that your customers are unaware of, but that it is essential for the smooth working of your restaurant.

In this blog, I will focus only on number one: the front of the house operations that covers from the moment than a customer makes a reservation (online, on the phone or in person) to the moment that they leave your place and everything between.

Every single aspect of your operations should work like a well-oiled machine; without hiccups and without your staff needing to wait and think how to act in each moment that something unexpected happens.

Often, restaurant owners and managers spend an incredible amount of time troubleshooting problems and dealing with customers complains and issues.

So what can you do to avoid this trap?

First, you must document all your current processes. I know that this may sound like a tedious task but trust me; it is important. You can’t improve your current processes if you don’t know what they are.

Just sit at your computer start writing down how do you currently handle your bookings:

Online from your site: do you have an easy and efficient way to manage online bookings? If not you should consider one. You should check www.bookingangel.com or some other online reservation system.

On the phone: Does your staff have a consistent and polite way to answer the phone?

Create a nice message and write it down. Make sure that you include the following points:

☛ “Hello, this is restaurant XXXXX” (Pronounce clearly the name of your restaurant), “How can WE help you?” (It is better to use we than I since it creates a sense of community)

☛ Make sure that you capture their name (ask to spell to make sure it is correct), contact's phone number, AND ask the reason of the visit and if they are coming for any special occasion.

This is very important. Most of the times when I make a reservation, the host(ess) don’t ask me why I am visiting the restaurant. If this is a special occasion, (birthday, anniversary, some celebration, etc.) make sure to write it down in the reservations book or online system so that you can greet and compensate your clients as appropriate.

☛ Repeat back to the clients the booking information: their names and phone numbers, the date and time and the reason for their visit. Not only this will avoid you misunderstandings, but your prospects will be happy to know that you are acknowledging the reservation, and you paid attention to them.

In person: Basically, follow the same rules than on the phone.

NOTE: Make sure that the person answering the phone or taking the reservation in person is smiling to the prospects. Even thought the phone, one can detect when somebody is genuinely happy and it makes the whole experience more pleasant.

In my next blog I will continue with the operations and talk about what to do when people arrive to your place.

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco

© Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

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