A recent article from RunningRestaurants.com cited some interesting facts:

Fact #1 - Most restaurant owners spend 90% of their marketing dollars in an effort to drive new traffic.

Fact #2 – Business from new customers typically represents only about 10% of a restaurant’s growth opportunity.

Essentially, the majority of growth potential for your restaurant lies with your existing customers. NetWaiter can help you cultivate those customers to become better customers.

A normal “phone-in” customer is impossible to track.  NetWaiter customers, however, are tracked and their information is accessible in your NetWaiter Management Console.  With that information, you can pursue several tactics to enhance your existing business.  Here are just two very quick tips -

1.    Launch an Email Campaign – Let customers know about special offers, upcoming events, and promotions.
TIP: Email customers who have not ordered in a while. Let them know about your newest dish or treat them to a complimentary dessert with their next order.

2.    Examine your menu for items that complement each other.  Sam Walton discovered people who bought milk (a low-profit item) often bought bananas too (a high-profit item).  Sam’s solution: position bananas near the milk to help drive-up profits.  
TIP: Find a popular low-profit meal that customers often order (your “milk”) and offer a promotion on a high-profit item if they order it with the “milk” item.

The best part of these marketing efforts - they cost nothing but the time it takes to create them.  The information and tools are already available through your NetWaiter Management Console.

Do you have promotions you only offer to certain customers and others you want to share with the world?

NetWaiter now offers the ability to set promotions as public or private. When creating a new promotion, restaurants can choose to display it on their NetWaiter site. If a new promotion is made public, it will show in the “Available Promotions” section on the restaurant’s site. If the promotion expires, it is automatically removed from the site.

For private promotions, restaurants can simply choose not to display them on their site. For instance, if a restaurant wants to generate a promotion for a select group of customers, they can prevent it from displaying on their site and email it directly to the intended customers using NetWaiter’s Email Marketing System.`