5 Starbucks Growth Hacks That Work for Any Coffee Shop

Starbucks growth hack number one, open early and own the morning. I came back from Europe recently, I was jet lagged. I got up at 6am, opened up Google Maps and lo and behold, the only coffee shop that was open in my neighborhood, and I live in New York City, was Starbucks. There are lots of coffee shops here and it turns out after I dug in a little bit further, 10 to 20% of Starbucks sales come during that window of time. In order to capture those early risers, which are, if you're opening a coffee shop, those are your perfect customers. You got to look at opening an hour earlier and then you're really capturing those people. And you're also bringing in regulars that in all likelihood, if you can become part of their morning routine, they're going to come to you over and over again. And that customer can be worth a lot over time. So again, you might need to go to sleep an hour earlier in the evening, but waking up an hour early, early bird gets the worm and that's certainly the case here. Starbucks growth Hack number two, launch your own mobile app. Back in 2015, Starbucks launched their app. Now they have 30 million active users and it's really the preferred method for most of their customers. Back then, Starbucks was really the only coffee shop that could build their own app. They had the cash means to do it, they could build an engineering team in house. But today, Fast forward nearly 10 years and you can use services like per diem to build your own app. It perfectly integrates with square. There's actually more capabilities in there than there are with the Starbucks app. First and foremost, this makes it just a lot easier and more convenient for your customers to order from you. Once you have an app, they don't need to log in every time. It's just one tap and they're in. It's right on their home screen, on their, their phone. And then once they're in, their favorites are there the recent orders. So two taps, that's in the checkout cart. It's a great opportunity obviously for you to upsell different things. And then I can just tap Apple Pay or if I have, if I've loaded up store credit, it's literally one tap and boom, checked out. Now I'm going to get push notifications telling me once my cup of coffee is ready. So again, this is a tool that a lot of coffee shops are starting to take advantage of. It's one of the big advantages that Starbucks has had for many years. But now you can catch up and really take advantage. Starbucks growth hack number three Implement a data driven loyalty program. When you log into the Starbucks app, you see your points there. You're able to earn more points with every purchase. And they also incentivize you at certain times, at certain days. Usually it's their slower days where you'll actually get extra points when you order. And then they'll further incentivize you where if you load up store credit in the app, then you get double points for every purchase you make through store credit. So you're able to emulate a lot of these things when you sign up for Square Loyalty. Obviously you can do this without having an app, but. But it's a lot more powerful when people can log into your app, see their points that they have with Square Loyalty, and then see what they can redeem it for. And then you're able to do these same things that Starbucks is doing. You can send out push notifications with incentives. Let's say on your slow days, today is Wednesday. Let's say it's not your busiest day of the week. Hey, double points today between 2 o' clock and 6 o' clock when you order through the app. That's a great way to engage people. You can easily set that up within Square Loyalty. Other things that you can do within per diem itself is you can launch a referral program. Hey, I'm going to refer my friend. Once they make their first order in the app, we're both going to get extra points. That's one great way to do it. We also have gamification in the form of spin the wheel. Spend $20 today and you get to spin the wheel and you get to win extra points after you place your order. In addition to that, we have a daily streaks feature. Hey, come three days in a row, spend $10 a day and then you get 10 extra points. So these are all things that you can implement in addition to just like the regular square loyalty program where you're giving points for every order. And then through the app, of course, you can also redeem those points. So I can go ahead, add my coffee, redeem it at checkout, and then boom, I have that free order. You can do the same in store. But obviously for people who already have your app and are signed up through your loyalty, then that's kind of the double whammy. So that's it. I think the lesson here is if you don't have a loyalty program already, something you should strongly consider it is something that can help to improve your spend up to 46% and visits 57% Starbucks growth hack number four send push notifications. So we mentioned square loyalty. How do you let people know of special incentives that you're doing with loyalty? Or if you have new menu items, how do you let them know? Obviously, email is a great way to communicate. You can blast out text messages. But the reality is the most effective and the most direct way to communicate with your users is to send them a push notification. And a push notification is a native notification sent through a mobile app. It's either on iOS, so iPhones or Android. And the difference is that it's going to be branded to your store, so they're going to see your logo there. You can customize the message. And the beautiful thing about it is there's no links or anything like that. As a user, when that pops up on my phone, I just tap and then I'm right in the app. So you want to let me know that, hey, we're running this special today. We got a bogo deal today. You have a new menu item that you should really check out. Whatever it is that you want to promote, then a push notification is going to be the most effective way to do it. It's up to 70% more in terms of open rates over email. It's the best direct response marketing channel there is. I think the caveat here is that you're probably going to have more email addresses than you do have people who download your app. But nonetheless, the people who do download your app, they're typically your best customers. They're the ones that are most loyal to you, and they're the ones where those push notifications will probably be most impactful. Starbucks growth hack number five Launch seasonal menu items Everyone at this point is pretty familiar with Starbucks's pumpkin spice latte. A few stats here. They do 500 million plus in annual revenue off of this drink. Since its inception in 2003, they've sold over 400 million. It registers a 12% sales spike for in their US stores once they launch this in the fall. And that includes a 24% surge in foot traffic and 16% higher spend per customer. You can do this, obviously, with the pumpkin spice latte, Peppermint mocha. There are different matcha drinks that people launch in the summer and those can be cold drinks, those can be hot drinks. I think the idea is to keep things fresh for your customers, engage them. These are really fun, exciting things. They make for great content on Instagram. When people are showing off their their latest drink that they got from your store, really this is something that you should lean into and leveraging a lot of the tools that we talked about before, especially if you have a mobile app, you can showcase those photos on the homepage of your app, take really good photos that are in the app, which will increase orders. And then you can also send out push notifications letting people know when a new menu item is coming, whether it's launched or whether you're launching it soon to build up that anticipation. And that's a great way just to get the word out and to help to boost sales.