Restaurants are competing for a finite amount of discretionary dining dollars. For this reason, raising your menu prices above your direct competition could result in a loss of customers.This is why focusing on upselling as a means to increase PPA as opposed to raising prices is a better strategy.
Consumers often decide where to eat based on a perception of cost. That perception is usually based on the price of your restaurant’s main entree items. Yet, when a customer sits down to eat, they rarely have an exact budget for what they are willing spend on a meal. This creates an opportunity for restaurants to gain more of their customers’ discretionary dining dollars through upselling.
Most restaurants today are employing a number of strategies to generate bigger tickets. Some well known upselling methods involve menu engineering, special promotions, and server upselling. The ultimate objective of each is to get customers to spend more money, either by purchasing more expensive items, or by adding additional items to their order, or both.
What our data shows is that upselling additional items leads to better results than upselling higher-priced entrees. This is because it is easier to persuade a guest add an item, like an appetizer, to their order than it is to convince them to buy a more expensive entree. The reason for this may be because guests feel that they are getting more value for their money by adding items, given that they are getting more food.
At a macro level, this insight has proved to be valuable, as we were able to utilize the information to maximize the effectiveness of conventional server upselling in a way that fits with the process you already have in place. In short, we put a highly-effective upselling tool at the center of our customer rewards program.
When paired with conventional server upselling, Jetti Rewards is able to increase customer ticket sizes in 43% of customer check-ins. The most commonly upsold item is an appetizer. These results are achievable because servers are able to leverage the value of the rewards program to entice customers to add additional items to their orders. Importantly, it does not require your staff to do anything more than what they are already doing.
Given that most restaurants already have a server upselling process in place, we simply provide a tool that incentivizes customers to upsize their orders. If you are already putting in the effort to upsell your customers, why not do everything possible to maximize your results? With Jetti Rewards, you can lift your PPA without increasing prices and can avoid the perception of being more expensive than your competitors.
If you are interested in hearing how our program is different and can help your restaurant organization, please email us at sales@jettisystems.com.