This year, 64% of Americans are planning on ordering at least part of their holiday meal from a restaurant; 37% will have the restaurant do the entire meal. Meanwhile, regular and local customers are out shopping, doing errands, and stopping by their favorite QSR and fast-casual restaurants. How can restaurant operators plan for a successful holiday season? And what can they do to turn this seasonal surge into long-term increases?
In this article, we’ll discuss 9 expert tips to making the most of the holiday rush.
9 Ways to Boost Holiday Success in the Food Industry
In many ways, the secret sauce of holiday success is the same as the secret sauce for the rest of the year: using technology to support innovation, personalization, and efficiency. But just as a few key flavors transform everyday cakes and cookies into holiday favorites, a few key twists on data-driven, tech-forward restaurant operations can make all the difference for your festive season’s success.
With that in mind, we’ve looked at six common restaurant management areas – menu creation, personalization, loyalty programs, digital ordering, pricing, and marketing/promotions – and found ways to tweak them for maximum holiday effectiveness.
1. Innovating Menu Creation
Limited-time, season-specific items are nothing new in the restaurant industry. Only witness the hype around Starbucks bringing back its holiday favorites (i.e. pumpkin spice everything) and you’ll understand what’s going on. Starbucks and other clever restaurant chains have taken a standard item and made it into something special. How? By:
Understanding customer preferences. Sure, Starbucks could (and does) have other season-specific flavors, but customers love that combination of sweet cream and cinnamon spice. By meeting customer preferences, they have a built-in audience.
Creating scarcity as a limited-time item. Customers know PSLs are only available for a few months, so they’re actively looking for their chance to grab a few. Imagine the effect of hearing that PSLs will be back in stock next week – you’d be sure to swing by the store in a week’s time, wouldn’t you? This principle also works if you’re introducing a new limited-run item; letting guests know that they only have a month or two to try it can really motivate them.
Another tactic that works well with new or limited-time items is to offer a discount as a perk to returning customers. For example, you might offer customers a voucher for 50% off your new cinnamon-spice mocha – good for their next visit to your store. Not only will they try the new item, they’ll probably purchase something to go along with it.
2. Using Data to Drive Menu Decisions
We’ve covered how data analytics can improve menu design and 3 ways to identify popular menu items using guest data elsewhere in our blog. Let’s quickly talk about the holiday twist you can bring to a data-powered menu:
Find customer favorites by looking for items that people tend to consistently and repeatedly order. You can use these to riff on (as in the pumpkin spice latte) or to expand into pairings.
To build pairings, consider items that go well together – either as a classic combo (e.g. chicken fingers, fries, and a drink) or items that your data shows are often ordered together (chicken fingers, ranch salad, and a milkshake).
As you’re examining your menu, think about how you can align it with your brand. What flavors, items, and combinations are you known for? What new angle can you bring to these to add excitement and interest? Your data will help you make this discovery.
3. Maximizing Profits with Pricing
Next, we move on to pricing. In addition to balancing cost and revenue, your holiday pricing strategy should include:
Festive items with strong value. These are items that feel special (and maybe are around for a limited time) but pack a lot of value for the consumer as well as the restaurant. Keeping these at an affordable price point means you allow your guests a little luxury in the midst of their busiest season. And keeping them at an attractive price point for you means you reap double benefits: profitability and customer engagement.
Holiday bundles. Whether it’s a full meal for a family or a BOGO offer for drinks for two friends, build bundles into your holiday pricing strategy. Bundles that are higher in price are great for your bottom line, and encouraging customers to bring friends or family can open your brand up to a potentially new audience.
In this era of corporate responsibility, it’s also worthwhile to think about socially-responsible pricing initiatives. For example, you can partner with local or national charities and donate a percentage or dollar amount of sales over a certain threshold to that organization. You can go one step further and offer cards that donating guests can sign that will be directed to that organization as well. It benefits your business, your community, and even your customer.
4. Personalizing Loyalty Programs for Holiday Shoppers
Loyalty programs are a frequent topic here on the Tillster blog. And no wonder: few things have so much potential – for customer engagement on the plus side and missed opportunities on the debit side – as a loyalty program. So how can you move your loyalty program into high gear for the holidays?
Use point multipliers. Create a system of point multipliers that increases every week until Christmas.
Try tier-based rewards: Provide a different “gift” for each new tier customers achieve before the holidays are over.
Create personalized visit goals and seasonal bonuses: Consider how many times customers have visited this year and set them a goal of X more times – depending, of course, on how frequently they’ve visited. In a related move, you can look at each customer’s typical spend and frequently purchased items, then offer them an opportunity to earn a bonus if they meet a minimum spend threshold or purchase an item that’s related to their favorites – i.e. something that’s complimentary or a holiday-themed version of a frequent buy.
Embrace gamification: Offer bonuses for completing certain challenges (e.g. trying new items or placing X orders) during the holidays.
Enable donations: Allow guests to donate their loyalty points to a charity or let them add a donation to a charity as part of their order. Then reward them for their generosity!
5. Doubling Down on Personalization
Personalization has become an essential part of the customer experience in fast casual and QSR environments. During the holidays, guests will often feel extra harried – giving brands a perfect opportunity to express care, appreciation, and empathy. This can take the form of personalized messaging or in finding ways to simplify customers’ lives and save them time.
Be careful, though, not to think of this as a one-and-done, seasonal initiative. Your goal in personalization is to foster loyalty by showing you understand your customer; this can give you more opportunities to build that connection and keep them engaged after the festive season is over.
For more about personalization in the restaurant industry, see our articles 5 Ways Personalization Can Increase Your Restaurant's Revenue and 5 Reasons Your Restaurant Needs To Be More Like Netflix.
6. Streamlining Digital Ordering
We’ve already covered how order throttling can improve your delivery and kitchen operations, but it can be an unsung hero during the holiday rush.
While goodwill might be the nominal holiday spirit, for most customers the actual holiday spirit is more akin to stress and frustration. You can remove some of that frustration with clear communication – in this case, by using order throttling to manage wait times and keep guests informed about how long their order will take.
Dynamic order management also lets you keep real-time tabs on what limited-time and standard items are unavailable or nearly sold out; this information can be passed on to guests, helping them avoid the disappointment of ordering an item that’s not actually going to come.
Consider adding pre-packed family or group bundles to your order flow for this season. Such packages are easy to order and your kitchen will quickly get used to assembling them. This means you can be even more effective (in terms of revenue) and efficient (in terms of service and operations). For customers, these bundles are time-savers – an easy way to decide on a meal and feed the whole family. You can make them more attractive by building a bundle around popular items.
Finally, think about how you offer instant reordering. Reordering makes it easier for customers to get their favorites, but is this option prominent on your website or app? The stressed-out holiday season can be a perfect time to quickly order a dish of comfort food – so make it easy! You may also want to provide an incentive to get guests familiar with instant reordering.
7. Creating Effective Marketing and Promotion Strategies
A good holiday marketing campaign often combines elements of the new (i.e. channels, messaging, etc.) and the old (e.g. favorite foods, happy memories). Here are some ways you can embrace this new-old combo for effective marketing:
Get one, give one: Choose a reward or coupon that sends a donation to a charity.
Use bounce backs: For example, you can offer customers something like “Come this month and treat a friend, and get a treat on us in January”. This has the triple advantage of getting the customer in the door, building business for the following month, and potentially converting a new customer.
Coupon advent calendars: In this riff on the traditional holiday countdown, each day in the run up to Christmas has a different coupon.
8. Leveraging Social Media Visibility
Similarly, you can tweak your social media accounts and activities to provide an extra boost during the holiday season:
Use data to customize your crowd: Using data from your customer data platform, create profiles that match those of your best customers. Then use this information to customize your social media targeting, which means your offers are seen by people who are (or who are like) your best customers.
Spread the word about holiday specials: This is a bit of a no-brainer, but it bears repeating. Announce limited-time offers and items on social media. Like Starbucks and many other restaurants with seasonal favorites, you can build anticipation and generate urgency by some well-timed social media posts.
It also makes sense to adjust your messaging somewhat during holiday times – especially if you’re partnering with a charitable organization. This can broaden your reach as well as strengthen your ties to the community.
9. Measuring Marketing Effectiveness
Actually, you’ll need to set the groundwork for this one before you start. As with any marketing campaign, your first step will be clarifying your goals. Amorphous goals like ‘attract more customers’ or ‘make X percent more revenue’ are of limited help because they are either hard to measure or they don’t come with a specific action plan.
A better idea is to use your data to create a variant of SMART goals – in this case, specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timely. To do this, you’ll need to know where you are, what your historic performance is around the holiday season, and how much you can reasonably expect to improve within the timeframe.
Finally, be sure to choose relevant KPIs and metrics before your campaign starts. You'll need them to gauge the efficacy of your actions during the holiday season – and to review the campaign for additional insights once the season is over.
Your Restaurant Can Thrive During This Holiday Season
In conclusion, the holiday season offers QSRs and fast-casual restaurants an opportunity to use personalization and other customer-engagement strategies to boost revenue. By deploying the right offers and messaging, the momentum you build during the holiday season can carry over into the new year – setting you up for a stronger first quarter and a better relationship with your guests.
