How to Maximize Holiday Restaurant Revenue

How to Maximize Holiday Restaurant Revenue

Here are some of the top ways your restaurant can unlock the power of holiday promotions and boost your revenue. 

Assess Past Performance and Establish Revenue Goals

Did you have a successful holiday season last year? Only by assessing past successes and failures can you establish goals and techniques that work for you. 

For example, if your restaurant caters to families and young people, you might want to focus on the sales generated by children’s menus and parent-and-child offers. You can then identify areas for improvement and implement new promotions and campaigns.

When setting your goals, it’s essential to be realistic but ambitious. If you brought in $100,000 in holiday revenue, split this down into revenue streams and aspects that affected your revenue:

• $9,000 increase on the previous year

• Half of your holiday revenue has a promotional code or price applied

• A 30% increase in average revenue over other quarters of the year

You can then set a revenue goal and implement strategies to achieve these goals. 

Employ Multiple Platforms for Holiday Promotions

Consumers now use a variety of traditional and digital media to consume content. To reach as large an audience as possible, employ social media and email marketing—sending targeted promotions to each consumer. 

Pro tip: Sell directly on your social media accounts. Your Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram followers can now become customers and order directly with Deliverect Social Media Ordering.

There are even tools that can support in-store holiday promotions. AI in customer service is gaining popularity and can help to predict what promotions a particular customer may enjoy—promoting return visitors. It can also handle online bookings and orders with a festive twist. 

Enhance the Menu With Festive Choices

Part of the seasonal appeal of restaurants is festive food that consumers wouldn’t necessarily make for themselves. Enhancing your menu with traditional festive options—like turkey and pumpkin pie—feeds into the season's spirit and may appeal to a broader range of customers.

Offer Seasonal Specials, Pricing, and Deals

With many establishments to choose from, customers expect to be rewarded for their loyalty. To support their experience, implement seasonal deals and pricing that appeal to your target demographics. For example, offering a group discount for holiday parties or families. You can even implement special deals into your regular customer loyalty program to encourage repeat customers across multiple festive seasons. 

Follow a Festive Motif and Ambiance

Ambiance makes or breaks an experience, particularly during the holidays. A festive ambiance makes the time of year feel special and unique from other times, and happy, celebrating guests are more likely to spend and return to your business. 

You can also integrate a festive motif with your brand for extra visibility. Festive branding is an excellent investment because it can be tweaked and repurposed yearly to encourage customer retention and make a significant festive experience part of your brand’s offering. 

Promote Staff Well-Being and Performance

The holidays are typically the busiest time of year in hospitality. It’s a time to look after your staff and customers. This is excellent for brand reputation, but it’s even better for general morale and the restaurant atmosphere. An efficient team can serve more customers and upsell more effectively than a tired, unhappy team. 

Conduct a Post-Holiday Assessment

Future success comes from assessing past campaigns. Analyze your revenue and the financial success of any seasonal campaigns—but don’t stop there. Check-in with your staff and implement any recurring customer feedback for a more successful following year.

Set up a meeting or review session with any stakeholders and your staff. If you run a chain or multiple restaurants, you may have stakeholders who can’t make it. Enterprise meeting management software can be beneficial.

Using Technology to Streamline Holiday Operations

Technology is vital for growing holiday revenue and supporting your team through a busy season. These are some of the most efficient ways to implement new technologies to make your holiday season profitable and more manageable. 

Deploy High-Volume Order Management Systems

Software that collates and manages in-store ordering can help to keep your kitchen running smoothly and reduce errors and wasted food. 

Deploying this across your estate, with proper training, is a great way to ensure that customers get their food quickly and correctly while taking pressure off your hard-working team. 

Pro tip: Integrating your POS system with your digital sales channels streamlines the ordering process, reduces errors, and minimizes manual labor.

Use Delivery and Online Ordering Apps

The range of delivery and online ordering for your restaurant can put your festive menu in front of more people than ever. The holidays aren’t just a time for meals out—they’re also a time to spend with family and friends while treating yourself to food delivery. 

Capitalize on this with delivery apps popular in your area. Using restaurant and e-commerce localization helps to put your restaurant in front of online customers in the area and get more orders than paid ads without location targeting. 

Tap into Deliverect Online Ordering to give your customers more ways to order directly from you —Learn more

Automate Reservation and Seating Systems

The holidays are a busy time for you but also your customers. With little time to organize many events and gatherings, customers want an easy way to make reservations. 

This also makes life easier for you, as you can instantly see when a booking is made and use this data to assign seating automatically. This way, you can avoid overbookings, keep pressure off the kitchen, and optimize the use of the space that you have. 

Pro tip: leverage Deliverect Order & Pay to master reservation management.

Instantly create custom payment links and enable prepaid reservations during prime hours to minimize no-shows.

Accept payment from methods your customers know and love (Apple Pay, Google Pay, debit and credit cards). 

Make Use of Data Analytics Tools to Predict Demand

The rise of smart tools in all industries means you can now use analytics with historical and real-time data to predict the times of highest demand for your restaurant. 

For example, a restaurant catering to large groups and office parties would likely see a steadily rising demand from the beginning of December to the new year, with a spike around the weekends. Restaurants could then use this data to order ingredients at the busiest times and schedule more staff during peak hours.

By doing this, restaurants can boost profit margins and embrace sustainability with less waste at quieter times. 

In Conclusion

The holiday season can be a busy and profitable time for restaurants. To make the most of this time, it’s essential to create a plan and stick to it. Utilizing the right technology and caring for your team and customers can help maximize revenue and ensure a successful season.