3 Ways To Keep Your Restaurant Patrons Coming Back

In our last blog, we revisited the concept of boosting restaurant sales and listed some pretty important methods that all Canadian restaurant owners can benefit from. Now, it’s still early in the summer. That means there’s plenty of time to grow your rate of patronage and encourage all those new customers to keep coming back even well after the summer is done!

Here are three ways to keep your restaurant patrons coming back:

1. Encourage your staff to interact with customers.

Upselling is a tried and true technique in many an industry. But in the world of dining, there are few things more effective than making food suggestions to help increase spend and develop friendly connections between your staff and its customers. Encourage your wait staff to be upbeat, friendly and confident in upselling. On RewardsNetwork.com, Cheryl Parsons offers a few good examples of how to do that.

“Would you like to order an appetizer before your meal?” she lists as an example question that helps to increase spend in restaurants, “I can recommend a great bottle of wine that would be perfect with both of your meals. Can I interest you in dessert? Seasoned fries with your burger?”

2. Create a loyalty program.

One of your key objectives this summer should be to get your current customers to keep coming back once summertime is over. One of the best ways to do that is to begin a loyalty program. Come up with a strategy that provides incentives for your patrons to return. Free appetizers, discounts, entries into contests – these are all effective ways to generate excitement about your restaurant that will get people to want to return to it.

On TheRestaurantExpert.com, Jenny Brooks explains that statistics prove that restaurant loyalty programs work. “According to LevelUp, members of a restaurant loyalty program spend 19% more on average when redeeming their reward, and their frequency of visiting your restaurant increases 75% between their first and tenth reward redemption. A natural side effect of a loyalty program is increased visitors, as those looking for somewhere to eat might bring along coworkers, friends, or family to your restaurant,” she reveals.

3. Make the payment process easy.

Parsons points out that one of the top ways to boost sales in your restaurant is to seat as many people as you can each and every day. “This doesn’t mean you should rush customers through their experience, but it does mean that you should be staffed appropriately to handle your tables and traffic,” she writes.

What it also means is that you should invest in technology that makes the process of making a payment incredibly quick and easy. The quicker your customers are able to pay for their meals, the quicker you can seat new customers. Even getting one extra table filled per day will help to boost profits!

The Poynt Smart Terminal is the perfect terminal for those “quick and easy” transactions. It’s considered “the world’s first smart terminal” and has already amazed both customers and business owners alike for its modern touch screen capabilities and incredible ease of use.

For information about how you can begin using the Poynt Smart Terminal in your restaurant, please don’t hesitate to call Canadian POS at 1-877-748-2884 or email us at info@localhost.