Prize draw marketing is a unique tool that can help your restaurant generate more business. As a series of unique drawings, you can use them to engage with your customers and turn them into loyal regulars.
It’s an easy but effective restaurant marketing method to generate new guests and make your business more popular.
Here are 5+3 tips that you should apply before and after your prize draw, to boost your occupancy rate even during the week. The best part is, you could even benefit if you are already completely booked during the week.Sounds unrealistic? Read Bonus tip 2 …
1) Use it to build your eMail List
Prize draws unfold their real power if you combine it with one of the oldest (but still effective) online marketing strategie … building up your eMail List.
Not for nothing there is a very common online marketing saying, to which nearly all famous and successful marketers agree on, that goes: “The money is in the list”.
So also you should use prize draws to collect eMail addresses and start with this undeniable effective method of doing eMail Marketing for your restaurant.
2) Market to the people who have been to your restaurant … or are interested in it
Make yourself aware of the fact that people in your list are there because they actively decided to take part in the prize draw. Be it because you promoted it directly in your restaurant or via social media pages of your restaurant.
They are most likely located in the area of your restaurant and would also eat there if they are not winning. Which increases the probability that they claim a current offer and you don’t waste your (marketing) money on people who are not in your target audience.
So make use of this powerful marketing channel.
3) Save money for traditional marketing campaigns
When running a traditional marketing campaign, you are often paying to promote each single event or offer in your restaurant.
Imagine you have an offer for the easter time and decide to promote it with a flyer that you distribute to the households in town.
Then you need to do and/or pay for this steps:
- design the flyer
- print the flyer
- distribute the flyer to each household in town
When you used prize draw marketing to build up your eMail List, you can send this offer with only one click to the complete list.
As you’ll probably agree, this saves you a lot of money.
Additionally you can see how many people clicked the Link to your offer.
4) Promote your prize draw in social media
If you already have a facebook fanpage you should use it to promote the prize draw.
Of course you can and should also use your other social media channels if you have enough followers.
On facebook a good method is to join groups of your town or area, and post your prize draw there if it is appropriate and allowed.
With that you’ll reach a lot of people who are in your target audience.
I suggest that you use a professional service to do the prize draws.
But I know that a lot of people want to save money and do it on their own via social media.
They make a facebook post along the lines
“Take part in our prize draw by following our fanpage and liking and sharing this post.”
to increase the reach of the prize draw.
This kind of prize draw marketing unfortunately is no longer working as it was, as it had been used very often and facebook users started getting annoyed by it.
That’s why facebook (the facebook algorithm) is punishing you for this kind of activity.
That means they not only cut down the reach of this post but also of your regular posts.
The good news is, there is a possibility to use a similar method to make use of this viral effect (read more in Bonus Tip 1)
5) Make offers that are only valid during the weekdays
Once you collect some eMails you have the possibility to inform people in your eMail list about current offers or events in your restaurant.
But if you only write an eMail every two or three month to promote a special event on the weekend when your restaurant is anyways more booked, you're wasting the real power of an eMail list.
So I suggest you regularly send out offers to your list that are only valid during the week (from Monday to Thursday).
This you can do every week or at least every second week.
Also you can plan a few weeks ahead and then shuffle the offers and repeat.
For example:
First week offer: “Get a free drink to your meal”
Second week offer: “Get a free dessert to your meal”
Third week offer …
Second month:
First week offer: “Get a free dessert to your meal”
Second week offer: …
Third week offer: “Get a free drink to your meal”
Sounds good but …
Maybe you are thinking:
“That sounds very nice but seems to be a lot of technical stuff and probably will take me a lot of time.
Even if I set everything up properly, how can I get enough people to take part?”
I have to admit, these objections are completely understandable.
That’s why you should absolutely take a look at bonus tip 1 on how to massively spread your prize draw without spending a lot of advertising money and bonus tip 3 if you don’t want to deal with the technical setup but focus on YOUR actual business.
BONUS 1
Let your Prize Draws go viral
Generally prize draws are a good reason to sign up to your eMail list.
The challenge is to promote it in a way that as many people as possible become aware of it. The methods to generate a viral effect on social media are unfortunately no longer working … respectively can even do harm to your reach (see tipp 4).
But there is software with which you can offer people more chances if they share your prize draw on their own channels, be it social media like facebook, twitter, instagram … or manually via whatsapp, messenger or eMail.
They even get their own referal link and an eMail if somebody signs up via this unique link.
In this eMail you could tell them that their chances have just increased and to keep on sharing their link to further increase their chances.
BONUS 2 (for restaurant owners who are … even during the week … already completely booked)
Use your eMail List for an additional revenue
There are a few restaurant owners who are so popular in their area that they seem to not need any marketing. Even during the week they have to send new guests home because their restaurant is completely packed.
With their restaurant there is no possibility to scale their business.
So you may ask what would be the point in doing a prize draw to build an eMail list.
And I agree it does not make sense … unless you start thinking outside the box.
For example if you have a greek restaurant which is extremely popular.
You know that you could probably very easy build up a quite large eMail List with people who are interested in greek food (maybe also greek culture, drinks, wines, herbs etc.).
So here are two ideas, the first is exciting if you want to create and sell something on your own.
The second is great if you want to promote other products to generate an additional income stream.
First idea: create products (herbes mixtures, olive oil, coffee etc.) of your own brand and use your eMail list to sell it.
Second idea: Promote already existing products for example on amazon via your eMail list.
If you sign in to amazon partner program you’ll earn a commission on each cart that cames through your affiliate link.
BONUS 3
Save time and money (use my professional support)
If you want to use prize draws in your restaurant marketing to get more guests during the week or even build an additional income stream but you don’t know where to start, this part is for you …
Because if you build up the System for viral prize draws as described in Bonus 1 you need to do three things
- buy a prize draw software system that handles the point counting and generation of referral links etc.
- an eMail Marketing System with which you collect the eMail contacts and send out your offers or news
- combine this two systems, create the pages for the prize draws, write the automatically send eMails and configure everything so that it runs seamlessly together … from technical as well as marketing optimized view
This will cost you a lot of time only to get everything working technically.
Also you have to create the pages and eMails in a way that they are optimized from an online marketing perspective.
If you have less knowledge in this field, your campaign will probably make less revenue than you could make.
What would you say if somebody would take all this struggle from you?
That means you only have to provide the prize that people can win and your adjustments for the pages and eMails.
After that all the technical configuration is done for you and the system can start to bring in new guests during the week.
When you have a special offer or event that you want to promote, you only send me one plain text eMail describing it and I'll insert it into your next newsletter and sent it out for you.
Wouldn’t it be pleasant if you can completely focus on YOUR restaurant, while all technical and marketing parts are done for you?
When you would get all this and pay only half the prize that you would normally pay only for the prize draw software, would you say that is a fair deal?
Let’s face it, such an offer is very rare because normally just the technical setup cost would be 5 times of the prize I’ll make to the first 5 people taking my offer.
And I know for sure big companies are paying a lot more for clearly less effective marketing funnels.
Start with your own prize draw marketing campaign and boost your revenue
Unfortunately I can only make this cheap offer to 5 people because it takes time to build up everything for you … and of course also my time is limited.
So if you want to build your eMail list, which acts as a salesman that directly contacts your target audience to bring guests to your restaurant during midweek nights, when it's usually at your quietest, just fill out the form and submit it.
I’ll then contact you via phone or eMail to find out if and how we can create a first prize draw for your restaurant.
I’ll show you in our conversation how easy you can make 600 € additional revenue per week.