You might think you can't do this because you sell a service or it doesn't work for your products. Well maybe this will show you how to tweak the promotion for your business. In this example it's restaurants and at first you might think it would not work for them either, but I will show you that it does and how it makes restaurateurs a lot of money.

We started doing this with the restaurants we worked with as soon as I saw that Black Friday was a thing. So this goes back about a decade and it has worked every time.

Context: We send out a Black Friday Offer email to diners who are on the mailing lists of the restaurants we do marketing for. Typically their databases range from around 5,000 - 100,000. When we began there were no booking apps or QR codes so our clients had to collect the diners details on paper... then we had to do data input for them. You can imagine how unpopular that was, but they did it and it paid off massively. Nowadays with QR Codes it's all much simpler.

How It's Done: The email offers the diner the chance to buy a gift certificate and receive 20% extra for free, so for example - buy a $100 gift certificate and get an extra gift certificate valued at $20. There's no catch or small print, spend $100 and get $120.

The Details: Anyone who sells gift vouchers knows that they don't all get redeemed, this is called breakage and I have known it range from 5% - 65% unredeemed! So even though the restaurateur is giving away an extra 20% some of that will never be claimed. Secondly when people come in to dine with their voucher, they often spend more than normal because it feels like this isn't real money. Thirdly if people have bought the gift voucher to give to others as a present (Christmas maybe), they are doing your marketing for you, introducing a new client to your venue. So that's free marketing!

And Finally everyone who has bought a voucher for your (in this case venue) has just excluded the competition. The voucher can only be spent at your venue and this gives your team another opportunity to wow the client.

If you want to brainstorm with me how this can work for you, you can contact me here

Howard

As well as business and marketing I coach and mentor many people re their personal and professional lives. If you want to explore your personal development or an issue that's keeping you stuck, I'd be very happy to have a chat with you, to do so contact me here