Get more sales with great cafe marketing
Effective cafe marketing strategies can help increase sales and drive business growth for your cafe or coffee shop. Marketing strategies that match your type of business and the customers you want help your business reach and engage with theses potential customers and promote your what you offer.
Let’s look at five of the most used marketing strategies for cafe businesses, to help you find out if they will work for you and your coffeeshop business.
Cafe Marketing Strategy 1: Promote special offers and discounts
One effective marketing strategy for your cafe is to promote special offers and discounts to encourage customers to visit your business more frequently. This could include offering discounts on specific menu items, running promotions on social media, and offering loyalty rewards for repeat customers from the offer.
When promoting special offers and discounts in your cafe there are a few things to consider:
- Determine the type of promotion that will be most effective for your business: To effectively promote special offers and discounts, it is important to determine the type of promotion that will be most effective for your cafe business. For some great ideas on special offers check out the Cafe Coach ebook – 45 Ways to Get Your Customers to Buy More and Spend More.
- Consider the timing of your promotions: The timing of your promotions can also be an important factor in their success. For example, offering a promotion during a slow period of the day or week can help bring customers into your quiet cafe and increase sales.
- Use a variety of marketing channels to promote your promotions: To effectively market your special offers and discounts, it is important to use a variety of marketing channels. This could include promoting your promotions on social media, email marketing, or through paid advertising (radio, podcasts, YouTube, school newsletters, and more).
- Clearly communicate the details of your promotion: To effectively promote your special offers and discounts, it is important to clearly communicate the details of your promotion to customers. Your marketing should include the terms of the promotion, any restrictions, and the timeframe in which the promotion is available.
- Track the effectiveness of your promotions: To determine the effectiveness of your cafe marketing, it is important to track the performance of what you do. This could involve analysing sales data to see if there was an increase in traffic or sales during the promotion, or soliciting customer feedback to gauge the popularity of the promotion.
Cafe Marketing Strategy 2: Make use of email marketing
Email marketing can be an inexpensive and effective way to market your cafe and its offerings to a wider audience. By creating and distributing newsletters or promotional emails, you can reach customers and encourage them to visit your cafe more often.
When undertaking email marketing for your cafe there are several things you’ll need to do:
- Build an email list: The first step in utilising email marketing for your cafe is to build an email list. This can be done by collecting email addresses from customers when they make a purchase or sign up for your loyalty program. You can also encourage customers to sign up for your email list by promoting it on your website or social media channels.
- Segment your email list: To effectively target your cafe marketing efforts, it is important to segment your email list into different groups based on factors such as customer demographics or purchase history. This will allow you to send personalised and relevant emails to different groups of customers.
- Create engaging and visually appealing emails: To effectively engage your audience through email marketing, it is important to create visually appealing and engaging messages. Using high-quality pictures of your offer, attractive design elements, and engaging subject lines to capture the attention of your audience.
- Test and optimise your emails: Just sending out emails and hoping for the best is not a good use of your time and effort. You need to determine the effectiveness of your emails, so it is important to test and optimise your email messages. This could involve A/B testing different subject lines or email designs to see which ones perform best, and analysing data such as click-through rates to gauge the success of your emails.
- Analyse and track the effectiveness of your emails: To truly know how effectively your email marketing is working for your cafe, it is important to track and assess how your cafe sales are impacted by emailed offers. Analysing POS and sales data to gauge the success of your emails will help identify areas for improvement.
Cafe Marketing Strategy 3: Leverage social media:
Social media can be a powerful tool for cafe marketing and driving sales. By maintaining an active presence on social media platforms, you can promote your business and its offerings, engage with customers in real-time, and encourage them to visit your cafe in the moment.
Using social media to market your cafe can be very time consuming and not always achieve the desired results. Before you jump in to leveraging social media for your cafe marketing, consider the following:
- Determine which platforms are most relevant for your business: The first step in leveraging social media for promoting your cafe is to determine which platforms are best for your business. This will depend on your target customer and their social media habits. For example, if your crowd is younger, platforms such as Instagram and TikTok may be more effective, while platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn may be more effective for attracting an older audience.
- Create a social media content calendar: To effectively manage your social media presence, it is important to create a content calendar that outlines the types of content you will post and when you will post it. This will help you stay organised and ensure that you are consistently posting relevant and engaging content that brings in customers.
- Use high-quality visuals: To effectively promote your cafe on social media, it is important to use high-quality visuals – photos and videos. Today’s smartphones have great cameras for almost professional like photos of your cafe and menu items. Platforms have filters and other apps to add visually appealing graphics to promote your coffee shop business.
- Engage with your audience: To effectively leverage social media for your cafe marketing, it is important to engage with your audience. That means responding to comments and messages. You can also host giveaways or contests, or ask for customer feedback.
- Analyse and track the effectiveness of your social media efforts: To determine the effectiveness of your social media efforts, it is important to analyse and track your performance. This could involve using tools such as social media analytics to track engagement, reach, and other metrics, or analysing data such as sales data to see if there was an increase in traffic or sales as a result of your social media efforts.
Cafe Marketing Strategy 4: Utilise paid advertising
Paid advertising can be a fast, effective way to reach a wider audience to promote your cafe. From advertising campaigns on social media, through search engine marketing, to being a sponsor for a live event, like a school fete. Paying for attention to your cafe business can bring quick results.
The thing to watch out for when doing paid advertising, is your cafe business budget. Advertising can get expensive and if it doesn’t get you any results, that can be frustrating.
Here are a few tips for utilising paid advertising in your cafe marketing:
- Determine your budget and advertising goals: The first step when deciding to do paid advertising for your cafe is to determine your budget and advertising goals. This will help you determine the type of advertising that is most appropriate for your business and whether you’ll need expert help or not.
- Research and select the most appropriate advertising for you: For every type of advertising strategy you can imagine there will be lots of different ways you can go about doing it. That makes it important to research first and select the appropriate advertising provider based on your budget and comfort-level.
- Create targeted and relevant advertisements: To effectively utilise paid advertising for your cafe marketing, it is important to design targeted and relevant advertisements. The targeting might be for a specific demographic or location, or it may be a specific day or time. It could even be using specific media, such as video or audio recordings versus text and pictures.
- Monitor and optimise your advertising efforts: To prevent over-spend the effectiveness of your paid advertising efforts need to be monitored and optimised. Analysing data may be boring or confusing, but without reviewing your campaigns you may just be paying good money for no marketing results.
- Consider using A/B testing: To effectively optimise your online paid advertising efforts, you may want to consider using A/B testing. This involves creating two different versions of an advertisement and testing them to see which one performs better. This can help you determine which elements of your advertisements are most effective and will help you optimise future campaigns.
Cafe Marketing Strategy 5: Create a loyalty program
Another effective marketing strategy for your cafe is to create a loyalty program. Offering rewards or incentives that encourage repeat customers, you can increase sales significantly. For more inspirational ideas that get customers coming back often the Cafe Coach ebook has 45 Ways to Get Your Customers to Buy More and Spend More.
Loyalty programs and rewards systems can be simple or complex. The simple coffee card that gets stamped after each spend is relatively easy to implement. While signing up to be part of a big loyalty program like Flybuys means contracts and POS systems.
Before you make any decisions about what a loyalty program might look like for your cafe, here are a few tips on creating a loyalty program for a cafe:
Determine the rewards and incentives that will be most effective
The first step in creating a loyalty program for your cafe is to determine the rewards and incentives that will be most effective for your cafe customers. This could be anything from free drinks or food after a certain number of purchases, to exclusive access to events or special promotions.
Consider the type of loyalty program that will be easiest for you
There are several different types of loyalty programs that you can implement for your cafe, including point-based programs, tiered programs, or punch card programs. It is important to consider the type of loyalty program that will be easiest for your business to put into action. Remember that it still needs to align with your business goals (making more sales).
Consider how customers will earn and redeem rewards
It is important to consider how customers will earn and redeem rewards with your loyalty program. What do you want your customers to do to earn rewards? How much does the loyalty program cost you to run? Will the customer have paid enough when earning rewards to cover the cost of the program? How will you know that the customer has done all the right things so that they can redeem the reward (how do you prevent cheating)?
Promote your loyalty program to customers
To encourage customers to participate in your loyalty program, it is important to promote it to them. Your cafe marketing budget needs to have funds to pay for promoting your loyalty program whether that’s through social media, email marketing, or through in-store signage and marketing materials.
Monitor and track the effectiveness of your loyalty program
To determine the effectiveness of your loyalty program, it is important to monitor and track its performance. Do the numbers add up? How much you are spending on running the loyalty program and how much extra you are making in sales needs to be in your favour. Make sure to analyse data such as redemption rates, customer retention rates, and sales data to confirm there was an increase in customers and sales as a result of your loyalty program.
Always keep in mind, that your cafe marketing is about promoting your cafe to drive business growth (make sales). If that isn’t happening, then review and update your marketing efforts to ensure that they are aligned with your business goals and are effectively promoting your cafe.