by Mike Stratfold

Created on: November 17, 2009   Last Updated: November 20, 2009

There are special ways to promote your restaurant that we will examine in depth which can enhance your restaurants performance over a long period of time.

These are as follows:

1. Win a free dinner for two promotion.

What you do here is get every customer to either drop their business card into a big clear bowl or similar or fill out their contact details on a designed form to enter into the competition. Make sure your promotion runs for at least a month or two so you get as many entries as possible. This then enables you to retain all of the customers details and put it into a data base of contact customer details for later marketing purposes. Make sure you get the customers to submit their full name, email address and date of birth.

2. Send out birthday cards to your customers.

Now that you have a data base list of your regular customers send each of your customers a birthday card on their birthday, wishing them well, but also offering them a free bottle of wine when they come in for dinner. This is good business as you get some business and you also get a loyal customer. If you have a large database list use the file maker pro software to set up an automated generating list so you know when each customers birthday is.

3. Email out a monthly or quarterly newsletter.

Once you have your list of customers email accounts you can use file maker pro or similar software to automatically email out your monthly newsletter. This keeps your customers up to date with any specials or menu changes or similar that you want to advertise.

4. Design your own flyer.

You can design your own advertising flyer using Microsoft publisher or a similar software program, which will then enable you to attract some local new business into your restaurant. You may be able to use your local postal service or local newspaper to help distribute your advertising a special one off evening or a special theme night in your restaurant attracting guests to your premises.

5. Employee of the month.

What you do here is get the customers to vote on who is the best staff member, by placing feedback forms on your tables. At the end of the month the staff member with the most points wins. What you can do is have a contra. deal with another local restaurant where you do a trade each month. Your staff member who wins gets to eat for free at the other restaurant then vice versa where the other restaurant staff member gets a free meal for two at your restaurant. This creates a great sense of purpose and

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