I used to have lunch at a chain sandwich shop near my office a few times a month. When they first opened, they were doing a good business. I enjoyed the place enough that I signed up for the corporate emails, which sometimes included coupons. I’d print them off and use them in the restaurant.
Granted, the town where I had my office has slid far, far downhill in the last 15 years. Three major factories closed around 1998, and a lot of the people left in town don’t make anywhere near as much money as they used to. So any business there is kind of hard.
There was (and still is) another franchised sandwich shop in town. For years, that chain had been my favorite. But they’d begun raising their prices to what I consider a ridiculous level, and I was really enjoying the new place anyway.
After the first couple months, attendance at the new shop began to taper off. The franchisee’s wife came up with a couple home-made marketing gimmicks. The first was a prize for the best holiday artwork drawn by a child. Not bad – get parents to bring in the kids, display all the art, give away $12 in merch a month later.
Then she had a “sign up for our newsletter” biz card drop box. I dropped my card, but never got an email. The box was gone in about a month.
Time went on. Employees got really lax. A couple times I was left alone inside while the employees went outside to smoke, hiding behind huge pillars to stay out of the wind. Granted, if I’d walked off with the cash in the till, they’d pretty much know who it was, but still it was a little weird to be left alone and ignored.
One day I went in, and the franchisee was alone behind the counter. I bought a sandwich and used a corporate coupon. As I handed it to him, I asked “You’re capturing the email addresses off these, right?”
He looked at the coupon – the store had been open for a couple years by this point – and said, “I didn’t know they had email addresses on there.”
I came back for another sandwich the next week, and I saw them loading equipment into a rental truck. The place was closed.
So, here’s my point: whether your restaurant is all yours, part of a regional chain, or a franchise location of a national or international chain, you need to put some kind of local marketing efforts into place. You have to actually do those tasks, and track the results. You have to develop a word-of-mouth network, encourage it to grow. If corporate (or someone, somewhere else) runs a campaign to get people in the door, do something to capture the contact info for those folks. Make them feel special and try to turn them into regular customers without always giving them a free meal. True – this is a difficult task. A lot of people using coupons only show up at your place when you’re running a coupon, and will flit to the next place offering a discount. But you’ve got to at least try. Give them a reason to enjoy coming besides the discount.
Excellent food is always a good reason. So is superior service, usually with personal attention. People love to be known – find out their names, send them a follow-up thank you card or email. Create a preferred diner’s program and offer members-only menu items. There are tons of things you can do to get people coming back.
