Though most cafés have a generally significant turnover, this does not mean that there are no ways owners can increase sales. There are ways of encouraging loyal customers to frequent your premises more often and ways to get guests to buy more when they check-in, which boosts sales to a considerable percentage. Here are easy-to-implement and affordable ways to boost your café sales.
Expanding the Menu
Having an extensive menu with additional meal-oriented options such as sandwiches, soups, wraps, and salads can be a great way of increasing sales, especially for cafés with a limited menu. From research, many cafés with speciality offering such as vegan and organic products do well compared to cafés that have not diversified their menus. Including a more extensive menu will attract new demographics to your outlet.
Grow the Sales
When faced with an operational challenge, it’s common for most restaurant owners to start by reducing the labour force, cutting on costs, and buying cheaper ingredients, which improves the margins quickly and reduces sales in the long run. However, to have a sustainable and successful business, one should focus on increasing sales, which helps reduce the
fixed costs, such as rent, giving the momentum needed to control variable costs, such as wages. To grow sales, one should consider giving discounts, starting a loyalty program and advertising through social media platforms.
Improve Efficiency
Inefficient services are a turn-off to both employees and customers, meaning that they will cost you much more money and time. For example, if the roster requires three staff per shift and sales grow by 30%, add extra staff and reduce the profits, or keep the three staff and render poor services. These two options aren’t viable; hence the most appropriate solution is to make the team more productive without extra effort and time.
Increase Capacity
Once you have improved efficiency and the sales are growing, this is an excellent opportunity to increase the café’s capacity. Some ways to increase capacity includes speeding up the service time, adding more tables during peak times, reviewing opening and closing hours, offering incentives during off-peak times and adding mobile ordering/home delivery options.
Changing the Product Mix
The products you sell are not equal because some will have high margins on sales while others have low margins and low sales. If you find that a product isn’t moving, consider dropping it from the menu.