Reservations…we’re still here and today we have another way to build your list and increase revenues year round.
Transcript of the Video: Building your List and Increase Revenues Year Round
Hey, welcome to Reservations. I’m Jeff Harrison and normally I’m here with my partner Andrew McCauley, but he’s on assignment at another location and I didn’t, we didn’t want to miss having Reservations today. Something I want to talk about today that I think is really important is we’ve talked about if you’ve ever watched us, we’ve done a tremendous amount of teaching and education through the Chamber of Commerce and score and whatnot. We’ve always talked about never building your platform or your business on rented land. Never really relying on something like that let’s say a Facebook or YouTube or whatever, but really own it.
Yesterday if you didn’t catch it, go back and look at it, but we talked about how important it was to make sure if you’re a restaurant, has peaked, you know, you are a new restaurant and you’ve peaked, now what do you do to keep that momentum going? Because we all know when we’re, you know, that newness when it wears off, what are we going to do?
People Celebrate No Matter What The Season
Well, I wanted to share with you one thing that I think is really, it’s really surprising. Especially, for those people here in the Coachella Valley where we’re seasonal. You know, I’m looking out and its 85 degrees right now. It is 9:24 in the morning, but it’s going to get up to over 100 and we’re going to have some warm months ahead of us. But there are things that we can do that people celebrate something no matter what the season. And what is that? Well, how about our birthdays.
You know, here’s the wildest thing, the months where we’re typically in the desert if you’re experiencing this wherever you’re at and you have this low in the summer. You’re not one of these people to say, hey, that now the summer’s here, the beaches, the lake’s whatever up north, take a look and say, well, when our birthdays, so, I say abundant. And quite frankly, June, July, August, and September are the highest months for birthdays now.
How Many People Are Celebrating In Your Restaurant
So what I did is I went into Facebook and I said, oh, by the way, if you didn’t know that we can actually say, we only put this message in front of people that are having a birthday in the month of you name it, June, July, August. We can do this every month, right? Hey, I just want to say, thanks Dawn for joining us and also Albert was joining us. I appreciate that drive safely, Albert if you’re not already in the desert. I’m meeting with him a little later with a client.
Take a look at that, so what I did is I looked up in June and I said, hey, how many people in the month of June are having a birthday? Now, what I did is I said, let’s take Palm Springs and let’s say everyone within 25 miles because for us that would say that would encompass the entire desert, the Coachella Valley. What I came up with, there are 35,000 people having a birthday in the month of June. Now what does that mean to you? Well, granted, not all 35,000 people are probably going to be your ideal customer, but what if 500 were? What if a thousand were? How many times do people go out and they are, hi Valerie, welcome, appreciate you joining us today. How many people are going and celebrating their birthday and they’re doing it by themselves?
New Potential Reservations
Let’s face it. Not many. Typically what happens, and I know every year, you know, when my birthday comes around and my wife’s birthday comes around, or the friends were always either inviting or invited and it’s usually a group of six or eight people. Well, what would that do if you are a local restaurant? What would that do to your bottom line? If you got 500 or let’s say, let’s say if you only got 100 additional reservations and that it was five or six people, it typically will be six every time. Well, that’s 600 new potential reservations that you have, or 600 new covers that you have. That would make a big impact for those businesses here in the desert in the summer.
Now you don’t have to just stop right there. Let’s say that’s one particular campaign. Oh, by the way, how are you going to get out to those people? What you can do, Facebook advertising. You can put a coupon in there and let’s say Valerie, her birthday and I don’t know exactly when Valerie’s birthday is. If you want to say it, Valerie, I’ll tell you, but make sure everybody wishes you happy birthday. But let’s say Valerie’s is June 17th. All right, so what happens if I would actually put an ad in front of Valerie and say, hey, join us here at Mastro’s and your birthday dinner is free. That’s because I know what’s going to happen is Valerie is going to bring her husband, Don. She’s going to bring friends and they’re going to. Have a nice celebration there.
There Is Reoccurring Activity.
Is it worth me to give away if I’m a restaurant? Is it worth me to give away one free dinner knowing that Valerie and all her friends are going to come and celebrate their birthday with us? Absolutely. Now, what happens when that does, when she clicks on my ad on Facebook, what’s going to happen is I’m going to ask her and say, Hey, Valerie, all you have to do is give me your name and email address, and I’ll send you in an email your coupon.
So guess what I now have, I now have Valerie’s name and email address which goes into my database and I start building that database. She’s already told me by, by doing that, that she likes our restaurant. She enjoys our food. So there’s a good chance that in the future she’ll come back or maybe because she has such a great time celebrating her birthday there. The next time somebody says, hey, where would we, where would we celebrate her birthday? She invites her friends. So there’s that reoccurring activity.
Give A Free Something
Now I looked up in July, there are 32,000 people in the Coachella Valley celebrating their birthday? So how do we get more people into our database? Get them off of a, Hey Ron, welcome, uh, welcome to the video. Um, so how do we get more people offline onto our database? One is to offer them a free something that will make them come into our restaurant and do it in such a way that more and more people come in. Now somebody might say, well, what about anniversaries? Will anniversaries are great, but typically that’s a little bit more intimate, you see that’s a husband and a wife or a relationship that they’re celebrating a day. So maybe that’s not so much that, but you could offer on something like that.
What about if you offered free dessert, right? So we come in and you get free, you know, you get your entree and then you get a free dessert for celebrating your anniversary with us. Now there’s been times where we’ve actually, my wife and I, we’ve actually celebrated our anniversary with additional friends, but typically that’s kind of a more intimate thing.
What Happens When We Lose Momentum
Birthdays, on the other hand, are where we celebrate it with our friends. So consider the next time if you’re a local restaurant or business, how can you reach out and say, Hey, let us celebrate our birthday, your birthday with us. And for that, we’re going to give you one free dinner for you, and then maybe we’ll do something either even if you invite a group of X will do something additional. That’s a great way to start building your database. And the whole reason for our message today was what happens when we lose that momentum of being that new restaurant that opened up in Palm Springs or Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, whoever that is, and all of a sudden the next restaurant opens up in that crowd moves. We’ve seen that. I mean, I see restaurants and I won’t pull anybody’s name out.
I’ve seen restaurants where they used to be the place to go and now you go there and it’s just, I’m going to say its average or sometimes less than average, but please don’t wait to employ this strategy that, hey, now my restaurant is on the other side is just, it’s flattened out to start doing this. Now, could you? Absolutely. But why don’t you start collecting this information right up front? So when your traffic is coming into your restaurant, ask them then guess what? You have to spend any money on advertising and you’re gathering that data and then I can actually send an email specifically to let’s say Ron and say, Ron, I know your birthday’s coming up this month. We’d love for you to celebrate with us and if you do, we’ll give you a free, you name it.
Giving You More Insights And Ideas
All right, so that’s really what I want to talk about today. I want to thank everybody for joining us. This is called reservations with. The reason we’re doing this is really to give more insight and ideas, tactics and whatnot, and strategies to restaurants, not only locally but throughout the United States who are saying, boy, I’m having trouble adapting my newspaper ads, TV ads. My flyers just aren’t getting the traction they used to will. The reason is quite frankly about 70% of us are now doing all of our searchings on our phone.
I would bet that there are people that are watching this and they’re watching on their mobile device. They’re not at home. I mean, I’ve got a computer here and I got a computer here, but I’ve already made a bunch of inquiries here on my phone. So again, join us every day. We’re here somewhere between 8:30 and 10 every weekday and we always come with some tips or strategies and some ideas, maybe some news. It’s impacting the business. So again, thank you for joining us. My name is Jeff Harrison. Thanks for all the shout-outs. I really appreciate that and we’ll see you again next time on Reservations.
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