I am all for paying to market to new customers, but I'll never be able to rent my mind around paying for our own diners.
Why should we have to pay cover fees? It's like getting penalized for being busy.
That's why I'm a huge fan of Yelp Guest Manager. It's a reservation and waitlist system.
Connected to a diner network nine times larger than open table, and they never charge cover fees.
Learn about their new 99 dollar per month plan for newly opened restaurants. It's restaurants.yelp.com forward slash podcast.
Or call 877, 571, 9357, and tell them full comps into you.
Welcome to restaurant marketing school. I'm Josh Cople, a Michelin rated restaurant tour.
To get them with chip clothes, run packing the tools and tactics used by million dollar marketing agencies
to help you grow your restaurant. Join us daily for a marketing tip you can use in your restaurant today.
Today we're talking about creating repeat guests.
So here's the thing I hear from owners all the time, right? What do you need? I need
butts and seats, right? That's what so many of them say, butts and seats.
And what they think of is like, oh, I need any new people. I need new people to come in.
If more people knew about me, I would be busier. And that may be true, but it isn't necessarily true.
I think the guests you have are pretty great. And the ones most apt to come on back and be a
part of the experience. They know the experience. You already convinced them once to come in. So
now just remind them about it. And I think we leave money on the table because we don't
reengage our existing customers enough. I was talking to a coaching client that's located in a very,
very small market. And it goes, maybe the reason that I'm not busy enough is because like I'm in this
small market. And I said, well, how busy are you? And it goes, I'm pretty busy. I'm just not at
capacity. And I said, well, what if everybody had to come to your restaurant once a month,
comes in twice a month? Oh, we'd be busy as shit. There you go. That's all the business you're
ever need. And so I agree with you. It's the lowest hanging fruit. You're not selling again to get
back to your point on don't sell them on more than one thing. It's hard enough to convince them to come
into the restaurant after you've done it. If you just make the broad line assumption that you've
done a good job, it's very easy to get people back. Do you want to talk about strategies that you've
used to lure people back? So the beginning of the strategy begins with a mindset shift thinking,
okay, if I suddenly just positioned my job as a marketer was to get everybody to come in. There's
150 covers on the books. Great. You won. You succeeded. Now your job is to get all of them to come
back to be repeat customers. And if you go into it with that frame of mind, I always give this
very, very simple challenge. This really simple example. I tell restaurant owners to say,
for the whole night, get the following sentence out of your vocabulary. Thanks so much. Have a good
night. I don't care. I don't care if they had a good night. I just showed them a great night. From here
on out, it's up to them. I don't care. I have nothing to do. It's a missed opportunity. The question
really is, right? Thanks so much. When are you coming back? Thanks so much. When are we going to see
you again? Hey, thanks so much. Whoa, you brought that couple in, right? We haven't seen that
other couple in a while. You guys should come back. Hey, thanks so much. When's your daughter back in
town? Hey, when's your daughter finish your freshman year of college or whatever it is, right?
Because hopefully you've gone to the effort and you've learned more about those guests in the
one, two, three hours they've been with you. Simply by challenging yourself to spend the entire night
inviting people back at the end of their meal. I promise you one out of four guests. One out of four
guests will say, oh, you know what? Yeah, my sister's coming into town next weekend. We weren't sure
where we're going to go. We will come back here. One out of four guests right then and there will
have you book another reservation for them. And yeah, maybe some of them go home and they decide to
cancel a couple days later. But like already you're getting so much more on the books as you move
forward. You do that and then you start looking at all the other different ways that you can do it.
And we were talking about how do you sell before and after the meal using automations. It's a great
opportunity to do it. When you send people a follow up automation after their reservation. So something
that triggers 24 hours, 48 hours after they left. Right. Thank you so much for joining us last night.
We just wanted to let you know that there is a wine maker dinner series next month every Monday
in the month of October. We're going to be hosting a different wine maker. We'd love for you to
join us. Click this link. Use this promo code because you've dined with us because you're an
existing customer. You get 10% off any ticket you buy. Being deliberate about saying, what else?
What else could I sell them? How else could I serve them? And you'll find all kinds of different ways
over and over and over. I think a great exercise is to ask the question. I think that everyone would
reply with the same answer. What would your favorite restaurant have to do to convince you to come back?
And I think the answer is the same for everybody. Simply remind you that they exist. That's really
all it is. The lure isn't that difficult. It's just people are busy and there are a lot of restaurants
out there. So you forget you forget even about your favorite ones. So simply taking the opportunity to
get out in front of them makes a massive impact. If you want to hear previous episodes or check out
our other content, go to restaurants.yelp.com forward slash marketing school. Thank you so much for
listening to the show. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts while you're there. Please
leave us a review. I'm Josh Kouple and you've been listening to restaurant marketing school.
