I wanted to share some of my favorite ways to avoid the January slowdown.
Let’s be honest, we all know it’s coming.
It’s probably already here.
Everyone just got their credit card bills and realized how much they spent on Christmas or the holidays.
January is historically a tight month, depending on where you are in the country.
So, I figured I’d share a few quick tips that I use in my own restaurant.
We encourage our clients to use them as well.
Let’s go ahead and get started.
Limited Time Offers
First, an easy one: Limited time offers.
You’ve probably done this before.
But in January, if you Google – and you can do this for any month really – just Google ‘January food holidays’.
It’s crazy how many national food holidays there are.
I mean, there’s one for every day of the year.
Take a look in January.
One of our clients is an Italian restaurant.
There are actually a couple of them that we’re going to take advantage of.
For example, National Spaghetti Day.
Get creative, come up with a special offer, like free dessert, half price – it doesn’t really matter too much.
Don’t worry about getting too complicated with what the deal is.
It’s really just a reason to have people come back into your restaurant in January.
National Cheese Lover Day is on the 20th.
We’re going to do a pizza special there.
My parents’ restaurant is a barbecue place.
National Southern Food Day is on the 22nd.
We’re going to do pork egg and cheese biscuits.
So, don’t be afraid to take what you already have on your menu and repurpose it for one of these food holidays.
If you wanted to do something a little more long-term, think about National Soup Month.
Could you do a special for the whole month or week?
If you wanted to draw people in throughout the whole month, you might not get as many per day.
But it’s a little bit of a longer promotion.
Doing one of the national per days, you might see a nice little spike on that day individually.
Double Down On Delivery
Alright, the next thing is to double down on delivery.
I included this because I’m in north-central Florida.
It has snowed here once in my lifetime.
So, we freak out when it gets into the thirties, and people don’t want to go outside.
I can’t imagine how it is in other parts of the country, where you guys are dealing with blizzards and negative temperatures.
If you’re able to, work with third-party delivery apps to come up with some kind of special promotion.
If you deliver in-house, maybe you can recruit some staff and run some specials to really double down on delivery.
This makes it easy for people to try your food.
Gift Card Bonus
The next one I feel is pretty obvious, but I still don’t see a lot of independent restaurants doing this.
It’s a gift card bonus.
You’ve probably seen this everywhere.
It’s super easy to implement.
There are multiple ways to do it.
The easiest one I’ve seen is this: for every $25 you spend, you get $5 back.
And you don’t necessarily have to target just Christmas shoppers.
People looking to spend money for gifts for others, sure, but what about your regulars?
Those who come in every day or every week and spend $100 a month with you.
Why not target them?
For example, if you know you’re going to come in every week, why not buy $500 and get $100 free?
This works well not only because people are in the Christmas shopping mood, but also it’s a nice bonus for your regulars if they want to take advantage.
As your list grows, we’ve got about 9,000 people on this list.
We sent out the email about the gift card bonus, and 4,000 eyeballs saw that.
You can Google it, but I’ve read several times that you should be able to make about a dollar per subscriber from your email list.
We sold a little over $5,000 with the gift cards.
That’s great too because it’s some extra cash in your pocket in December that can help cushion the January slowdown.
Then, hopefully, some people will start bringing those in in January.
SuperBowl Promos
It’s not quite in January, but you probably want to start promoting it towards the end of January.
As you can see from the image, there are tons of things you can do.
People like to have Super Bowl parties.
Maybe if you have TVs and you showcase sports in your restaurant, you could throw an event for the actual Super Bowl.
I wanted to throw this on here because, when we were opening our second location, we had a pretty good relationship with the credit union that was helping us.
The VP of marketing lent us some reading materials.
One thing she said that always stood out to me is that she likes to spend her advertising dollars when people are already in the mood to spend on food.
I’ve really taken that to heart with our own restaurants and my clients as well.
There are two schools of thought here: double down on your strengths or try to get better at your weaknesses.
If you can relate that to restaurant sales, like maybe you don’t have a strong lunch but are always super busy for dinner, or vice versa, your customers are telling you what you’re known for, what you’re good at.
So, I’m always in the school of thought of like, hey, let’s double down on our busy periods.
If you know you’re going to be pretty busy for the Super Bowl, let’s double down.
Let’s get as much as we can on that day.
If you’re always busy on Fridays, let’s run another special on Friday to get even more people in.
That’s when they’re telling you that’s when they want to come see you.
Mystery Envelopes
And finally, the last thing I wanted to show you is something that I can’t take credit for.
I can’t remember where I read about it, but the first time we did this, our January sales were up 15%.
Ever since then, we’ve done it every year, and now our customers go crazy for it.
The concept is a mystery envelope.
Let me just show you what it looks like.
I don’t know if you can see this, but starting about two or three weeks before Christmas, we handed out a couple thousand of these.
Each one has a guaranteed prize.
Obviously, a lot of small prizes like drinks, desserts, sandwiches, side orders.
But we also give away some of our bigger catering packages.
And then one person, the grand prize winner, gets free barbecue for life.
We actually already had someone win that yesterday on the third.
Ideally, you’d want that person to win later in January because as people start to find out, they might be less motivated to redeem their offer.
But every envelope does have a prize in it.
We get them from our printer, stuff them, seal them with a sticker on the back.
To redeem the prize, to be eligible, they have to bring it back in January unsealed and let our cashiers open it.
The whole idea is like we’re giving them this gift in December.
It’s a good marketing tool in December to get people in because they might want to get the envelope.
You can send out emails and text messages saying like, hey, don’t forget your mystery envelope.
And then in the first week of January, it’s like, hey, don’t forget to redeem it.
So, it’s really like a double-edged sword for December and January.
But it’s one of the best things that we’ve done.
They bring it back in, and they have from the second to the 24th to redeem their prize, you want to create a sense of urgency.
They can only redeem one per person per day.
Obviously, you might have some regulars that end up with a few of these.
You can come up with your own rules.
If they don’t want to use it when they come on the spot, will sign it and let them bring it back.
You can force them to use it on the spot, but that’s sort of it in a nutshell.
Conclusion
In conclusion, these strategies – from limited-time offers and doubling down on delivery, to gift card bonuses and innovative Super Bowl promotions – have proven effective in boosting January sales.
The mystery envelope concept, in particular, has become a customer favorite, significantly increasing our revenue during this typically slow month.
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