How This Restaurant Owner Almost Doubled His Profits With A Menu Launch

Today, we’ll talk about how one of our clients has handled a staffing problem, increased the number of people coming into his restaurant, and nearly doubled the amount of money he made using the same strategy he used two years ago.

If you saw my video series on bootstrapping or zero-cost marketing earlier last year, then you might recognize the promotion on how to launch a wine dinner and menu at the same time to bring in more customers. If you watched it, you'll know that the same strategy brought in over $47,000 from just two emails. Two years later, we’ve just finished re-running that same strategy, so I'd like to update that information for you.

We used email marketing to successfully launch a new menu. 

In this case, it was an autumn menu, and I linked it to a wine presentation where people could choose to have a bottle for free with their meal. This promotion, which we ran in 2020 has skyrocketed in the year 2022.

Our client made $47,093 from the original promotion, he got 258 people to come in with the email invite, which brought in 864 diners in total. This year we ran the same promotion using the same email but with slight tweaks to it.  And it generated nearly $81,000 which almost doubled the amount of money he earned previously.  It brought in a total of 1,480 people with 394 email invites redeemed.

The great thing about this client is that he really understands his demographics. He’s going for an older demographic, not going for next-gen or millennials. He's targeting a demographic that he understands and that lives around his restaurant. They're typically 50 or older, and some of them are retirees.

The promotion is about wining and dining, which appeals to that demographic. He understands his market and the message he needs to convey to it. He understood the kind of offer he needed to make to get people in.

The offer was that if they came and ordered from the new autumn menu, they'd also be able to choose a free bottle of wine as an accompaniment. Before you get too concerned about the cost of that promotion, let me assure you that there are arrangements with wine companies that go on in the background, so he doesn't lose money from making the offer.  And as I mentioned earlier, he made approximately $81,000 from this, so it’s a great strategy.

Another benefit was that they could ensure that his staff were employed at busy times, so he wasn’t paying people to stand around…

He got people to book in advance for 6:30pm bookings.  Consequently, he could turn the tables at 8:30pm too. This meant that he handled the staffing problem since he was getting a lot of people through the restaurant at the same time on the same nights. This meant he could manage his rosters and even close on quiet nights due to staff shortages.

This time the promotion got more people coming through the door than in 2020 there were 258 redemptions last time, this time he got 394 redemptions, and the total number of diners has increased from 864 to 1,480.

Because his customers were given a free bottle of wine, they felt he was being generous. And a great deal of them spent more than the usual spend per head buying another bottle of wine or dessert etc.   They also dine in groups which increased spend per table too. It's almost like the community wants to give back to him.

So the strategy is quite simple:

This is an example of the kinds of strategies we do with all of our clients. We advise them on the strategy, create the email (including graphic design) and then send the emails out at the most effective times.

They just need to do what they normally do, which is run their restaurants, be hospitable, and take the money.

Want to know more about marketing your restaurant?  Book in for a quick, no-obligation chat with Howard by clicking the button below.