Columbus Day isn’t the only holiday that falls in mid-October. There’s also National Dessert Day on October 14. A dessert promotion in honor of that day will boost brand awareness, bringing new and existing customers into your restaurant and increasing sales. You can leverage the holiday in three ways to get the job done.
1. In-house promotions.
“Buy one, get one free” promotions are always popular because let’s face it, who doesn’t like getting something for nothing? So consider offering customers a complimentary dessert with the purchase of another sweet treat at full price.
You might also want to use the holiday as a way to widen the ranks of your loyalty program participants. Incentivize and reward customers with a free dessert simply for signing up for the program.
2. Social media.
Increase your reach and engagement on social media by spreading the word about your National Dessert Day promotion. The more you do this, the more customers the promotion will attract and the more positive its impact on your bottom line.
Go all out to publicize the promotion on your Facebook page, as well as on your Instagram and Twitter feeds. Use tantalizing dessert photos and messaging that will make your offer irresistible.
To use social media to its greatest advantage here, urge others to share information about your offer on their own social media pages. This will likely attract customers who’ve never heard of your restaurant, but can’t resist doing so once they’ve heard about your plan to celebrate National Dessert Day. It should also pique the interest of consumers who’ve visited your restaurant in the past, but not lately.
3. Targeted e-mail offers.
Use your existing customer relationship management (CRM) and loyalty program data to find the names of recipients to whom you can send targeted dessert offers. You can specifically target customers who haven’t dined at your restaurant in a while. For example, send these patrons a coupon that’s redeemable for a free dessert with the purchase of one dessert item during their next visit. Or, offer a coupon good for a discount off the regular price of a dessert option.
Another twist on targeted e-mail offers for National Dessert Day: Send these offers only to customers who purchase dessert at every visit — or almost every visit — to your restaurant. In this case, you probably want to structure the offer around a freebie or discount — perhaps, buy 10 desserts, and the 11th one is free or available at half the regular price. Targeted e-mail offers like this will probably induce loyal customers who occasionally take a break from frequenting your restaurant to come back so they can enjoy their treat.
Yet a third option: Build your promotion around a specific dessert, such as your restaurant’s signature cake. Then, create a targeted National Dessert Day offer to send to those customers whose orders always include that particular item (e.g., a “buy one, get one” or discount coupon offer). It’s a great way to engage with diners and make them feel special, in turn inducing them to spend more money at your establishment.
Finally, you can use a targeted e-mail offer to deplete your supply of a dessert item that simply hasn’t proven to be as popular as you’d hoped. To figure out which item that is, consult your point of sale (POS) system.
National Dessert Day is the perfect springboard for building your business. Whether through in-house promotions, targeted e-mail offers, or a combination thereof, dessert-based special offers —all publicized via social media—will bring sweet rewards.
