| Saturday, April 19, 2025 | CONTACT |
Add $1,000 or More to Your Business's bottom Line in 30 Days!
Increasing Sales
For many coffee bar owners, just applying the cost cutting measures I have suggested will easily yield the extra $1,000 a month bottom line I promised. But if you already run a tight ship, cutting costs alone may not do it. You are going to need to increase sales!
Now, before we move into sales building techniques, you need to do a reality check on the fundamentals of your business! There is no sense in trying to attract more customers, if you are going to disappoint them when they show up at your store.
Is your store clean and appealing? Are your employees friendly and helpful? Are the products you're serving wonderful? If you aren't doing all of these things well, then your marketing efforts are only likely to bring new people through your door one time. Everything has to be perfect, and make sure that it is before you embark on your marketing campaign!
I could write 50-pages on marketing, but the goal here is to give your business a $1,000 bottom line boost in 30-days, so we'll only concentrate on a few ideas that always seem to yield good results.
The power of FREE
The two most powerful and persuasive words in advertising are New, and Free. If your business has been open for six months or less, you can probably use both of these terms in your promotions. If you have been around for a while, then obviously you want to concentrate on the term, Free, (unless you are launching a new feature).
So, what should you give away, and how should you distribute your offer? I suggest giving away a FREE 12oz. drink of your customer's choice. Your cost on any 12oz. drink should be under a dollar. $1 to get someone into your store is an incredibly cheap price! I remember running a news paper ad with a coupon for one of my past restaurants, and it cost me $650 to run that ad just one time. I got back two coupons. It cost me $325 per customer; ouch!
Now, you might be tempted to cheap out and offer a 50% off or buy-one-get-one-free campaign instead; DON'T DO IT!!! If you distribute a coupon giving away a free drink, you might find that 20% to 25% of the people you distributed coupons to will end up coming into your store. But if you offer a 50% off or buy-one-get-one-free, you'll probably be lucky to persuade 1% to 3% of those people to pay a visit. Also, it's been proven that when you give someone a free drink, a significant number will end up buying a pastry or sandwich too, so when it's all said and done, the free giveaways will cost you little or nothing. In fact, you'll probably actually end up making some money off of your promotion.
Hand distribute your free drink coupons along with a to go menu to all the surrounding businesses and households within a 3-block radius of your store. Do this once a week, for an entire month. Yes, we are going to give these folks 4-free drink coupons over one month! We want them to establish the habit of coming to our store. Nothing reinforces a habit like repetition. You have to provide them with the motivation to keep coming back.
When distributing your to go menus/coupons to the surrounding business, you, the owner, should be the one doing it. (You can have someone else distribute the coupons that are door hangers to the surrounding households if you like.) It's important for you to be the one promoting your business to the other shop owners in your area. Take advantage of your visit each week to establish some rapport. Ask about them, their business, talk about the economy, local events, and of course, throw in a pitch or two for your business while your at it. It's important to get on a first name basis with these folks, because you are going to ask some of them to help you market your business in the near future.
To further insure we will capture new people when they come in with their free drink coupon, have your cashier hand them a ½ off your next purchase coupon. I know, this may seem a little over the top, but you will only be doing this extensive discounting for about a month. The goal is to expand your daily customer base; significantly. It takes these extreme measures to achieve exceptional results.
Consider the following. If your average purchase per customer is $4, then here is what an increase in daily customer counts can produce in increased sales:
10 new customers X $4 = $40 a day, $1,200 a month, $14,400 a year
25 new customers X $4 = $100 a day, $3,000 a month, $36,000 a year
50 new customers X $4 = $200 a day, $6,000 a month, $72,000 a year
100 new customers X $4 = $400 a day, $12,000 a month, $144,000 a year
Do you now see why giving away a few hundred bucks in free product is worth the investment? How much better would your business be doing if you pulled in an additional $6,000 to $12,000 a month in sales?
If you have a website for your business, and a data base of the E-mail addresses of your current customers, shoot them all a free drink coupon as well, to thank them for their loyal patronage. Set it up so they can access and print out the coupon from your website. Make sure your website technician structures the coupon so that each recipient can only print the coupon one time. (You don't want someone printing out 1,000 coupons so that they can have free coffee everyday for the next 3 years!)
You need to be the Johnny Appleseed of coupons. Give out thousands if you can! Remember, they don't cost you anything if they aren't redeemed, and for the ones that come back, they'll represent the best value in marketing dollars that you will ever make. When I owned my restaurant, I use to always have a pocket full of free lunch coupons at all times. When I filled up with gas, I gave the attendant a free lunch coupon. The lady behind me in the supermarket line, she got one too. I even gave coupons to my purveyors and their delivery persons. If they drank liquids, and ate food (and who doesn't), they got a coupon! Plant enough seeds, and eventually you'll end up with an orchard of fruit, ripe for the picking!