‘Tis the season of takeaways and dining in. Implement some simple promo and engagement ideas to boost your online orders and make sure your restaurant is performing as well as it can during the highly competitive festive period. Utilise various digital channels to bring your customers back and gain some new ones.

1. Special Christmas Offers

People like to host and dine-in over Christmas and, given the current climate, they will even more so this year. Try to offer your customers a dining experience at home with Christmas themed meal packages, festive meal deals, and multi-course meal offerings. Perhaps add a discount for packages designed to feed a large dinner party.

On-premises performance may take a bit of a hit this year, but this can effectively be counteracted with large orders that are great value for your customers but high value orders nonetheless. Make sure your customers know about it by getting out some simple push notification campaigns, social media posts and emails, all with the right messaging. Let them know you can sort out their Boxing Day feasts, NYE canapés, hangover cures for the day after, or just give them a quick hunger fix for all those ‘I have no ideas what day it is’ days in between.

2. Reward Loyalty

Identify your best customers and send them a little Christmas treat. Anything from a personalised thank you card, voucher codes, exclusive discounts over the Christmas period or free menu items. Not only will you have a long lasting impact on your loyal customers, who will repay you in turn, but the organic marketing you will generate through word of mouth will be worth it alone.

On the Redbox system you can simply run a report to identify your best customers, and get in touch with them via our simple Push and Email campaign creator.  Let them know you’re feeling festive with a reward, and you’ll keep them coming back next year too.

3. Treats for Children

Great family restaurants always make a little extra effort to show they care by making it a great experience for the kids (happy kids also means happy parents). It’s a good idea to carry this into your takeaway experience as well. You could include a little sweet treat with every child’s meal, take a little ‘happy meal’ inspiration with a small toy, or offer free children’s meals with high value orders.

It can be hard to make a takeaway personable, like you can when your customers are dining-in, but adding a personal touch like this can go a long way in generating loyalty.

4. Social Santa

Christmas themed social media content is a given, and you are hopefully getting some good festive content onto various social media platforms. It’s good to get creative with it too and try some less common engagement tactics. Here’s a couple of ideas:

Competitions – offer a santa sack full of treats for some lucky winners who share your posts. This encourages followers to share your posts, and you can even ask the winners to do a personal post of the prize for further exposure.

Go live – you can do this on Instagram, Facebook and other social platforms. It’s a creative way of promotion and generating instant interaction with your customers. Why not have Santa in his grotto (your restaurant) giving out vouchers to customers and their children interacting with the live feed?

Christmas Content – short videos, tik toks, deals exclusive to social media. Anything that encourages interaction, sharing and tagging.

5. January Blues

Don’t let your online performance crash with everyone’s mood following the festive period. Make sure to capitalise on your engagement over the Christmas period and keep your customers coming back for the comfort food they need in a cold January.

Budgets and diets are a common theme in January, so be sure to give out great value offers and maybe even healthier alternatives this January to encourage your customers to order from you. All in all, do the best you can with your online presence in the midst of a time that may discourage people to dine-out.

If you would like to have a chat about optimising or setting up your brand’s digital ordering service drop us an email: sales@redbox.systems or give us a call on +44 (0)1134660024

‍