Restaurant gift cards can do a lot to help your bottom line, and the holiday season is the perfect time to get serious about selling gift cards. In today’s blog, the foodservice experts at McDonald Wholesale discuss how to sell more gift cards for your restaurant.
Start Selling Gift Cards Online
If your gift cards aren’t available online, you’re missing out on one of the best methods of selling gift cards to your customers. Not only do online gift card sales better accommodate last-minute shoppers, but it makes it easier to successfully market your restaurant gift cards, as people can buy them immediately upon encountering an email or social media ad. Plus, it makes it so that people who live out of town can quickly and easily purchase restaurant gift cards for their family and friends who live in the area.
Promote Your Gift Cards Prominently
If you’re wondering how to sell more gift cards for your restaurant, a good place to start is with promotion. While it may be a smart idea to run paid social media, TV, or direct mail ads, there are plenty of other more affordable restaurant gift card marketing strategies. To get started, try displaying your restaurant gift cards at hostess stands, on table tents, in menu inserts, and on any store-front signs. From there, make sure to promote gift card sales on social media, in e-mail campaigns, and by having your servers try to upsell.
Create Gift Card Incentives
If you want to figure out how to increase gift card sales, a good way to start is by creating gift card incentives. Because people end up spending more money than their gift card covers, and because some people never actually use their gift cards, it likely won’t hurt your bottom line to offer some incentives. You might, for example, offer a $5 gift card for every $50 gift card purchased or a $10 gift card for every $100 gift card purchased. You can also enter anyone who buys a gift card into a giveaway for an array of gifts and prizes, including free appetizers, free desserts, free branded merchandise, etc.
Incentivize Staff Upsells
One of your greatest resources to sell more gift cards is your staff. In the same way that they might upsell someone on an appetizer or a bottle of wine, you can use your staff to boost gift card sales. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, run a contest and provide a fun prize for whoever has the highest amount of gift cards in a given week. You can even enter all of the winners into a drawing for a larger prize.
Contact McDonald Wholesale today to learn more about our restaurant services, including wholesale foodservice delivery, restauranttechnology, menu analysis and development, and restaurant marketing. In the meantime, check out our foodservice blog where we cover everything from the best brewery promotion ideas to the best restaurant patio ideas for winter.