A popular marketing vehicle used by restaurants is the limited time offer, or LTO.  

Typically, LTOs are special menu items or offerings made available for a short period, often offered in unison with a holiday or celebration of some sort.  These opportunities work especially well with online ordering.

NetWaiter has assembled a list of non-holiday events that are great for online ordering LTOs:

•    Do you have a local minor league baseball team, or a major league team for that matter? Offer a combination of foods for a pre-game tailgate party.  You can set the offer to be available after a certain time on game day.
•    The Saturday wedding special - a bag of sandwiches for the groom and groomsmen, or finger foods for the bride and her bridesmaids as they get ready.
•    Do local parks offer summer evening movies or concerts?  Customers can order dinner online and pick it up on the way.

NetWaiter and limited time offers - a combination that can help your bottom line.  Develop your offering and use the NetWaiter Management Console to email it to your database of online customers.

This month, we wanted to highlight some NetWaiter tools available to restaurant owners. 

NetWaiter Social Widget – About a year ago, we unveiled the NetWaiter social widget.  If enabled, this field appears on the front page of a NetWaiter site, allowing restaurants to post announcements, updates, or promotions.  You can advertise the soup-of-the-day, a special on a popular appetizer, or some other message that lets your customers know what’s going on at your restaurant.  Customers can also use it to interact with your restaurant, leave comments, or giving a ‘thumbs-up’ to one of your posts.  Of course, as owner, you have control over what messages are displayed and can edit posts in the NetWaiter Management Console.

Hide / Show Functionality - Many restaurants have special dishes or items with limited quantities.  “Homemade Lasagna” is a good example.  If your restaurant were to run out of Lasagna, or any other dish, you can simply ‘Hide’ the item in your Management Console to temporarily make it disappear from your online menu.  When it becomes available again, simply ‘Show’ the item.  This prevents the need to delete and re-add items, and also keeps hidden items in the same position on your menu.

Variable Prep Times – NetWaiter just released a new feature that allows restaurants the ability to configure Prep Times based on the time and day of the week.  The normal "Default Prep Time" allows restaurants to indicate when an order could be made immediately available (i.e. 15 mins).  During rush periods, however, it may take longer for meals to be prepared.  This feature lets restaurants configure different Prep Times based on the day and time.  Is Friday at 6:00pm busy for your restaurant?  Solution: set your Prep Time to 25 minutes, rather than your normal 15 minutes.