Updating your restaurant menus to a digital format does more than improve the look of your menus and the atmosphere of your restaurant. Digital menu boards can actually increase your sales.
Here are a few ways how you can use digital menu boards to sell more food, guide customers into your restaurant, purchase more while they are there, and keep coming back for more.
Rotate Your Offerings During the Day
If your menu items change throughout the day, you can use digital menu boards to remove and add items as their availability changes. Breakfast items can be prominently displayed in the morning. Then, the breakfast items can come down and be replaced with lunch and dinner offerings.
This helps declutter your menu as you only need to show available items. It also helps decrease confusion as you customers will only see what they can order.
Utilize Time and Day Parting
Changing your menu items throughout the day may sound like a lot of content management. But, you can use time parting to automatically change the content on your digital menu boards based on the time of the day. For example, when lunch is over at 3 pm, the content on the sign can automatically switch over to a dinner menu.
Parting can also change by the day of the week. So if you have weekly specials, you can use your digital menu boards to sell more food by automatically adjusting your daily offerings with no extra work on your part.
Limit Your Menu Offerings
Decluttering your menu has benefits in other ways. Menu experts suggest that limiting menu offerings is the best thing for customers. “As we complicate menus, what we’re actually doing is tormenting the guest. When the guest leaves they feel less satiated, and part of it comes down to a perception that they might have made the wrong choice,” explained restaurant consultant Aaron Allen in an article on Mental Floss.
Limiting your menu options makes guests feel like they made the right decision. And when they feel like they made the right decision, they are more satisfied and more likely to return to the restaurant again.
Speed Up Ordering Lines
When your menu is clear and uncluttered, it also helps customers find what they are looking for and make their decisions faster. This speeds up your ordering process and keeps your lines moving more quickly.
Menus that only include available offerings also help speed up lines as they decrease customer confusion about which items are actually available and decrease the number of orders that include items that are no longer offered.
Highlight Combos and Upsells
We all know the phrase, “Do you want fries with that?” Cashiers regularly ask this question in an attempt to encourage customers to purchase combos. Digital menus can be used to serve the same function.
By highlighting combo meals with photos and information on the cost effective benefits of purchasing the combo, you can use digital menu boards to sell more food and meal deals.
Feature Photos of Menu Items
With digital menus, you can feature more than lists of your food and drink items. You can feature beautiful photography and images of your offerings. Displaying photos of your menu items can actually direct your customer to make purchasing decisions.
A study by Iowa State University found that showing images of salad on a digital menu screen prompted diners to order more salads. People are more likely to order something when they see a photo of it and know what to expect.
Control Your Inventory
Being able to control the content on your menu and quickly change the available items allows you to easily highlight specific menu items. You can prominently display photos and easily mark down prices of certain items. Controlling your featured items in this way helps you control your inventory.
You can guide customers to purchase items that are overstocked or about to spoil. Or, you can guide them away from items that are close to being out of stock.
Display Signage in Your Waiting Section
Placing digital menus in front of hungry customers in your waiting section can increase your sales. Showcase your featured entrees, but spend more time featuring appetizers that your customers will be more likely to remember and order as soon as they sit down.
Displays Signage Outside of Your Location
You can use digital menu boards inside of your location to sell more food. But, you can also place them outside to increase your sales.
If your restaurant is in a mall, hotel, or other location with heavy foot traffic, don’t just place your menu in a glass case near the entrance. Lure people over to your storefront and into your restaurant by featuring content with large, colorful, and desirable graphics of your food offerings. Seeing what they can get inside will lure in new customers.
Promote Loyalty Programs
You’ve seen how to use digital menus to get people through the door and purchase more when they get inside. Now, use your signage to get customers to come back again.
Display information about your loyalty programs and show your customers what they can get in return for being a repeat customer.
You can even use interactive digital signs to collect their information so they can join your loyalty program right away. Allow customers to sign up before they make their initial purchase so they will already be set up to come back again and start collecting their rewards.
Are you ready to make the switch to digital menus so you can start improving your customer loyalty and selling more food in your restaurant?
Learn more about the possibilities of digital signage in our free ebook, “Everything You Need to Know About Digital Signage.” The guide includes a full breakdown of the many benefits of digital signs along with a list of questions to help you decide if signage is right for your business.