Grow your business with these Christmas period tips

The silly season is one of the busiest periods in the hospitality industry. Festive feasting and holiday drinks are an injection that many will be counting on – especially given how turbulent the last few years have been. We’re here to help you make the most of the period with some hot tips for stuffing your holiday stocking with increased visits, extra customer spend and more. 

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Get your Christmas menu popping 

A good way to attract guests is seasonal specials, and the Christmas period is filled with endless potential. The list goes on and on: mulled wine, mince pies, egg nog, Christmas pudding (yuck but classic). Put your own spin on a holiday menu, but back it up with the right bells and whistles to encourage purchases. 

We’ve spoken endlessly about how good visual menus are as a selling tool (it’s kind of our thing). So, be sure to apply those same tips to your seasonal offerings. Ensure items have professional photography, upsells are front-and-centre for users to add to their cart, and look at creating sections and categories for your festive fare. 

Through visual menus, me&u, customers see an average 30% increase in order values and up to 300% increase in orders from categories like cocktails. 

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Keep your processes tightly wrapped 

Busy periods can equal chaos if you’re not too careful. Extra bodies in your venue and large groups often result in moments where you’ll be in the weeds. So it’s a good rule of thumb to scrutinise your processes before the weeds can grow (AKA spraying them). 

Our customers frequently praise the reduced admin times they see with Order & Pay. Having digital ordering and payments in place allows staff to spend more time making guests feel welcome and less time processing bills and taking orders. 

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Keep a tab on things 

You can take reduced admin a step further by encouraging large groups to use me&u's Tabs feature and place multiple orders under one invoice. If they’re in a group, the Tab owner shares their unique link with everyone to order from their devices, with the total charged to one card. Orders are received as usual, so you can start using Tabs in your venue without changing operations.

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Rewards are the gifts that keep on giving

Look at the increased traffic over the holiday period as an opportunity to land yourself more repeat business in the New Year. Don’t just focus on making the initial visit enjoyable – give guests a reason to come back again and again. 

Incentives are the best way to go about this and are easy to implement. Customers who are offered incentives are much more likely to return to your venue, so make sure they know about your me&u-powered Loyalty program or seasonal promo codes.

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Turn that gift into a kingly one 

Take rewards to the next level by integrating them with a CRM (a system that will take your customer relationships and turbocharge them). Here’s how that process works:

1. Customers order through Order & Pay and opt-in to receive communications. This is most effective with a loyalty program (through this method, Wynyard Pavilion’s database grew by 4000 active users over three months.) 

2. Their data gets fed into the CRM, creating a customer profile. 

3. You use the CRM to send tailored email and SMS offers that use insights based on profile data to bring customers back into your venue. 

CRMs vastly reduce the time you spend setting up campaigns and provide exceptional value with minimal investment. For example, our CRM client Vapiano generated £18,000 over one weekend off the back of £600 through an SMS campaign. Yup, that’s just a casual 2900% ROI. Ho ho ho indeed. 

Book a demo today if you’re keen to see how me&u can bring some Christmas cheer to your business. 

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