Alcohol is where the money’s at. With profit margins much higher than food, investing some time into pushing drink sales might be exactly what your bar or restaurant needs. To help get you started, here’s nine tips for improving alcohol sales.
Daily Drink Specials. Having a special drink featured every day incentivizes regular spending throughout the week. Margarita Monday, ‘Tini Tuesday, and Wine Wednesday are just a few popular examples to work with. Feel free to get creative!
Seasonal Drinks. Just like daily specials, seasonal drinks keep customers interested for the long term. Courtesy of Total Wine, here’s a list of seasonal cocktails for every season.
Stay Trendy. Keeping up with what’s currently popular is important for every drink menu. If you want to move sales, you’ve got to know what’s in the current zeitgeist. Courtesy of Drinks International, here’s a list of the world’s best selling cocktails for 2019.
Get Local. Speaking of trends, it doesn’t get trendier than local goods. And local food isn’t all that’s proven popular. Customers love experimenting with local drinks. Take a trip to one of your local distilleries, wineries, or breweries and find something perfect for your menu.
Social Media Promotions. Social media is an excellent way to promote an upcoming Happy Hour or drink deal. Lure customers in with a compelling offer. Something that might encourage them to be spontaneous, and head out for a drink tonight. For example: “Don’t miss out! Everything on the Happy Hour menu is half off TONIGHT ONLY. See you then!”
Food and Wine Pairings. Pairing food and wine together is presented as a complete dining experience. Recommending specific pairings can encourage customers to buy (more expensive) bottles they normally wouldn’t have had their eye on. Of course, it’s important to create quality pairings, and not just pairings that have bigger profit margins. Courtesy of Food Newsfeed, here’s a list of basic principles for food and wine pairings.
Email Coupons. Have an email list? Take advantage of your existing customers and reach out to them with special offers via email. Birthdays are a great excuse to surprise customers with a special drink deals exclusively for them.
Give Your Cocktail Menu Style. Your cocktail menu is meant to highlight the best drinks your establishment has to offer. If your cocktail menu is drab and boring, it’s not going to have the desired impact. You want it to be stylish, interesting, and most importantly, effective.
Server Upselling. Upselling drinks can make all the difference when the check comes. Properly training your staff to upsell can be a challenge, but it’s wholly worthwhile. Ensure that your staff knows exactly what to recommend whenever customers have a certain taste in mind.
Promote Digitally With CoGoBuzz
With CoGoBuzz, you’ll have your customers thinking about what they’re going to drink before they’ve even sat down.
Leveraging advanced WiFi, SMS, and Email solutions, CoGoBuzz promotes your drink menus, deals, and more directly to customer mobile devices. Starting with a one-time login to your restaurant’s in-store HotSpot (through email, social media, or phone number), customers are taken to a custom landing page. This page is specifically tailored to your bar or restaurant. From there, they can check out your specials menu, sign up for your brand new text-based loyalty program, and more! On top of that, CoGoBuzz develops fully-realized customer profiles for every single login.
Click here to learn more about CoGoBuzz!
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What steps has your bar or restaurant taken to improve alcohol sales? Sound off in the comments!