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Sell a Calendar Full of Vouchers
Howard Tinker • February 2, 2015
Why You Should Sell a Calendar Full of Vouchers
How many ways do you market your restaurant?
This is a very unique restaurant marketing strategy that we came up with. I've never seen anyone else do it. It's an opportunity for you to sell a calendar full of vouchers for your restaurant. So if you think about, what people are doing are, buying marketing materials from you.The first time that we did this, we had a calendar that fit inside a CD case. Inside it, was a years full of calendar pages. On the back of each of those calendar pages was a voucher (with the restaurant's branding and phone number on each one). So people would buy this for twenty or thirty dollars at the end of the preceding year (through November and December).
Starting in the following January, people would bring these vouchers in. It works in a lot of ways - obviously there is branding going on because this is your brand on the front of the calendar and it is going to be in front of them all year round.The second thing is that each month that they look at the calendar, it reminds them to come into your restaurant.The third thing is, if this costs you $5, $7 or $10 to make and you are selling it for $20 you are actually making profit upfront by selling people your advertising materials.
We took it a step further the following year and we created with Alio, a calendar that had on one side a recipe, then there was the voucher and then there was a calendar page. The next page, different recipe, different voucher and again a different calendar page. We went from something quite simple, to something that was much more complex and both of them worked! When we tracked sales from those vouchers in those restaurants, we could see that people were spending from those vouchers, all through the year.
So, not only were the restaurant owners making money upfront by selling the calendars, they were making great money from people bringing in these vouchers because they track the sales.What was really interesting is we could see which offers throughout the year that worked really well and which ones didn’t work so well. This gave us great insight for those restaurants about what offers to use at different times of the year. This restaurant marketing tip is a very unique way of driving business into your restaurant.
- It works all year long.
- You make money up front.
- You make money from the vouchers.
- You’ve got your branding out there all year.
Take aways:
- This is a repeat business strategy.
- Prepare this in September or October.
- Sell this in November or December.
- Have a unique offer for each month.
- Track sales each month.
- Consider a recipe book combination too.
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