Drive More Customers During Off-Peak Hours | Strategies for Restaurants Using Square

Foreign thanks everyone for joining our weekly webinar. Today we're going to be talking about how to maximize business during off peak hours. So we got some exciting content for you. I'm Tomer Malovinsky, CEO and co founder of Per Diem and it is June 26th. So jumping right into the agenda, just a brief overview. We'll talk about different promotions and discounts that you can actually set up in Square and then they reflect in the app. We can talk about different theme day promotions that you can do as well as double points category discounts. We can talk about how you can package that all out and package that all up with different types of push notifications that you can send out. And then some additional elements that we've added recently that you can include into this, including like gamification and just different banner and coupon strategies that you can do on a per location basis as well. And then if there are any questions or if there are any requests for specific like demos, then we can do that. At the end we'll probably just hop into a demo and show a lot of these features in the app. So on that note we will get right started a few stats. Just to start off, we like to kind of piggyback on a lot of the success that Starbucks had with their app. And so just looking active users of the Starbuck app, they end up opening the app itself 16 times per month. So obviously that's huge. Push notifications are a big part of that. They generate a 22% increase in revenue. So this is promoting seasonal items, discounts, you know, giving you messages about your points, all that stuff. And then reward members end up visiting Starbucks stores three times more often than non members. And of course I would say about 99% of those reward members have the Starbucks app and use the app for ordering. So on that note we'll jump in promotions and discounts. So there are a bunch of different types of promotions that you can set in Per Diem itself. But also Square lets you to set up different discounts and these discounts can be added either by item or by category. So for instance there's a specific, you know, your pizza place, your coffee shop, there's a specific, you know, all your pastries, you can set up a discount and then within that you can set up additional criteria for that discount so you can set a schedule on that discount. I want this to run just on Monday and Tuesday after 3pm and so for instance, one thing, there's a whole company startup dedicated to this too good to go where you know, if you have baked goods, they basically sell them through their app at a way discounted rate. It's like 25% of what the regular price is. You can do something similar with your own app and you can set that up through Square. So like all your baked goods instead of, you know, giving them away through a third party app, you could send out a push notification or to certain members or whatever or just make it available that hey, between, let's say you close at 4, between 3 and 4 every day you can get half price, bake baked goods or whatever price and you can just set that up in square and then you can promote that however you see fit and people will be able to purchase that in the app. The other things, other discounts that you can set up are quantity based discounts. So this is your classic buy one, get one free or if you have something like again like a pastry or cookies or something like that, maybe it's like a higher quantity that you're selling and you get one free. And then again those can get promoted as well. And then you can set up discounts around certain customer groups. So this you can leverage. For instance within per diem you can see who's ordering at a certain location and then maybe you want to set up some special discount for that location. You can upload a group into Square and then you can promote something individually to them, give them a discount. You know, typically that's used for like employee discounts and stuff like that. But you can get creative on that and if you wanted to, we usually see the item discounts and the quantity discounts, those are used most frequently. So it's important to note that the promotions and discounts are separate from square loyalty. So these are things that you can set up again you can schedule them so they can, you can schedule them for off peak hours and then you can send out emails, put it on social, send out push notifications from the app in order to promote these different promotions theme days. So one way that one of our busier restaurants, Tika Shack, one way that you, they use the item discount is they do a Tika Tuesday. And so you can see every Tuesday they feature one of their main bowls for $10. And so you can see they've had great success with this. Certain Tuesdays they'll be up, you know, well over 300% for, from you know, the previous day, the previous week. And so obviously that'll change based on what item they're putting out there. And then they do a good job of kind of promoting it in app. So they have these banner ads that pop up in the app. They send out push notifications through the app and then they also leverage email to make this happen. So you can see how they've taken like Tuesday, which know, everyone knows it's not Monday, but it's still not the busiest day of the week in terms of your restaurant business. And they've turned that into a real strength where it's actually like the busiest day they have. So that's a great example. You know, Taco Tuesdays are also really popular and you know, just pick your own item and day of the week that you're slow and you can make a promotion out of it. And I think as long as you do it through the right channels, you can see here what the effects of that will be. Double points. So this is another. Obviously Starbucks kind of popularized this, but this is something that you can easily turn on if you have a square loyalty. So you can see on in square itself you would just go into, obviously you have to be signed up to square loyalty. But then you just go in, you can create that promotion, same deal. You can, you can set a schedule to this. So you could say, hey, let's do double points, you know, on my slow days, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or just one day a week, you know, after 3:00pm or you know, whenever you get slow, whatever your slow time is, and then cool. And then you promote that thing again via email. These don't even necessarily need to be dedicated emails. These can be like. And by the way, you know, like, you know, and you can also promote these things in store, obviously. But these are great ways just to increase engagement. You know, you saw the numbers earlier from Starbucks. People who tend to then gravitate towards these deals, then they end up purchasing from you more down the road anyhow, not just discounts, but in general. And so and so we've seen this become extremely valuable and popular and just it's really easy just to turn on. And then you can al also offer either doesn't have to be double points. You can do multipliers, you can do one and a half points, you can do two points or you can just give additional points. You could say, hey, you get 10 bonus points for every so and so you get to you order today. So that's another thing that you can do. You can set this up on square itself. And then within per diem, you can also set something up as well where you can give extra points for every purchase. The difference being if you set it up in per diem, it's only going to apply to the app, whereas if you set it up in square, it'll apply in all your channels. Category discounts. So I mentioned this before, but Chip City, they run a category discount where if you select 5 cookies you'll get the 6 one for free. And so here you can see on the left you can create that discount. You just select what category it's in. So they have their cookies under their cookie category obviously. So they're just setting that up in square. You set that up and then you set, you know, for here there's no schedule, it's just like a evergreen promotion that they do. And so but you can set that all up right in square. And then once people are checking out in the app, it's real easy. They check out and they'll see the discount right there. And obviously that's a great way to upsell people on in this case, additional cookies. There are other different types of promotions and stuff that you can do that have like cost threshold. So for instance, if you offer delivery, obviously you can, you know, make it so like over a certain amount you get free delivery and stuff like that. So there are different techniques that you can use. With this one specifically, it's, it's not necessarily at an off peak hour, but again you could schedule something like this. Whether it's a, you know, category discount, a buy one, get one free, you could do it at a specific time during your slow period. So if you know, you're busy after or you're, you know, slower right after lunch from three to five or whenever it is cool, you can offer this promotion and then, you know, promote it accordingly. So push notification strategies through the app. There's, you know, a plethora of push notifications that you could send out in general push notifications. They'll increase, you know, obviously open rates if they're, if it's time sensitive. So you have a promotion that you're running today and it's only, you know, you have a promo code, it's only good for today. Hey, that push notification is going to get more play than if you're, you know, while it's good to do, if you're introducing like a new item or something like that, whenever it's time limited, that's going to get immediacy. So push notifications are part of this bucket of direct response marketing. You know, think of direct response as being email, push text messages. So these are things that you're going to send out and there's going to Be a direct response, usually in the way of an order. And so this is just another way for you to do that. So again, not all your notifications have to be time sensitive. Do this today or whatever. You know, a lot of building your brand is just about like, hey, we have this awesome new offering. We're having an event this Friday. You know, obviously leverage the notifications and all your communication channels for that. But when, when you do want to drive business at certain times of the day and you're including these promos, hey, send out a push. It's a great way to, to connect. And the great thing about a push notification as opposed to text and email, a it's going to get more visibility. It's got your branding all over it. It's not coming from phone number 59034. That's like, seems a little shady. And then you can like personalize them and, and do a lot of stuff that, that you know, you can't necessarily do during text and with text and then 1, 1 tap and they're in your app. That's the other benefit. No logging in. No, no, nothing like that. So that, that helps a lot. Spin the wheel. So we started gamifying parts of the per diem experience. So this is one of those gamified experiences right now. Like, you can't necessarily schedule it in per diem, but this is a feature that you can easily turn on and off. So hey, you want to do something like, you just want to try it out? You know, it's Wednesday. We're not very slow. Hump day. Whatever. Hey, let's just turn this on for the day. Let's send a out a push notification to all our members and say if you order today, any order over $10, you get to spin the wheel and, and get extra points. You can do a test like that. You can see how it works. We obviously offer an analytics dashboard within per diem so you'll be able to track that and see, you know, how much that drove. But this is just a fun way to engage people. You know, again, maybe this is something you do once a week, once a month, on special occasions. You know, maybe it's like a holiday thing. You can customize the wheel with your different colors and branding. Maybe it's. If it's around the holidays, you know, you can do kind of like a Christmas wheel or something like that. So definitely you can get creative here. And yeah, and this is just a fun thing and I think one of many fun things that we're going to be Building into the app to help really elevate the overall experience for your customers. So promotions by location. So there are different things that you can now do within the app and you can promote if you do have multiple locations. And so those are the different types of banners. Now you can see these pop up banners. You can either add an image to these banners, they can be all text, or you can even do video now. So you could upload a video to YouTube and then you can embed that into the banner. So those are fun. We also have the sticky banners, which those aren't necessarily the pop up, they're just on the homepage. They're a smaller section. And now you can add photos on the sticky banners too. So let's say, you know, let's say you have a slower location in general, you know, you want to push something just to that location. Well, maybe one thing that you could do is now within our dashboard, you're able to export all your users from that location. So you can export them, you can actually import them into square, put them under a customer group, send out a push notification and an email to that customer group promoting something specific to that location. So, hey, thank you so much for being a loyal customer to our Brooklyn location. Get $2 off when you order a latte today or any coffee drink today. And then you can create the promo codes as such. So then you're given. It's kind of like this personalized promotion which tend to do better and tend to drive a lot of loyalty. It's like, oh yeah, I go to the Brooklyn cool. So like no other location gets this, just the location that I go to. So I'm going to feel, you know, special about that. And that's going to help to build that loyalty over time. So again, you can segment within per diem and within our whole push notification mechanism, you can segment different groups and you do that in square, but then we pick that up in per diem. So when you're sending a push notification, it's really easy to say, hey, I want to send this to all my Brooklyn customers. Let's do this unique promo code that's only available at the Brooklyn store. And by the way, I'm only going to show this banner to people who open the app and are tapped in on the Brooklyn location. Cool. So Boba Bliss, they're one of our stores that has done this with great success. So they were opening a new store, so they wanted to promote that new store, send out a push notification. It was part of a larger campaign, but you can see that kind of helped them in general launch the app, you know, get that fanfare they needed. And then, and then once you get that initial boost, you can see there's like a lot of, of jumping with the numbers, but, like, it levels off at a higher. So you'll see that in general with your promotions that you run, you'll run promotions, and especially if you're running them offline as well. So it's great to do things in the app, but hey, you probably have a database of anywhere from hundreds to thousands to ten thousands of users in square, sending out an email with a good promo, putting in store signage around so people see it. Putting stuff on your website to promote things on certain times, obviously Instagram, but really your assets are the ones that are going to work the best and then use those to promote the app once people have the app. You know, we've already mentioned all the stats, especially if they're, you know, they're automatically enrolled in your loyalty program. Once they are, they, they order from you 3x more on average than people who don't. So, you know, there's a lot built into that. And so here you can see how this plays out. And it's simple as, again, setting us a unique promo code for a certain store. In this case, they send out the push to everybody because they wanted everybody to go to that store, but you could again, segment your audience and just send it to the people who, you know, go to that store on a regular basis. So that was a successful promo that Bobo Bliss had. So, yeah, I'll pause for a minute and see if there are any questions that anyone has. And if not, we can jump into a little bit of a demo and I can show off how the app works in these different scenarios. All right, well, I'm going to take that as. So let me share. I'm going to share my screen again. All right. Can you see my phone? Yes. Awesome. So for this example, we'll be going into the per diem app. This is our test app. Right. Great app. And so you can see this is the home page of the app. And I've already set up some promotions within Square, so you'll, you'll then see them in the app itself. So one of the promotions I've set up is a buy one, get one free on our muffins. So basically here I'll just be adding two, and then I'll go into our cart, and then you can see automatically there's a $7 discount here. I can see the BOGO Wednesday deal and that's right there. So again that's a scheduled promotion that I had set up in square and then it just appears in the app every Wednesday between certain hours. Another deal that I had set up. I believe there was actually that might have been the one that I had set up. Let me see. Double points. Oh in general we did set up like double points too. So now you know, when I do order something, whatever here you can see the brand muffin I get four beans we're calling them but that's something. I'm not necessarily promoting it right now in the app but I could, I'm promoting our store credit. So this is again something that you can do on a time. Like you can offer really good incentives on store credit and have people purchase. It's not necessarily something that would drive business at off peak hours but it's a way to drive business, you know. And so that's. So now this, this banner is for that. But I could easily say hey, today only get double points on all your, you know, if it's a certain category or something like that then, then you can do that in terms of. I mentioned Chip City. So here you can see going into their app, I really like these cookie butter cookies. I'm gonna go in and then you're going to see they have this discount buy five get one free. So that just works really nicely in the app. And then again you can promote that however you see fit in general. Then also I think just in general push notifications. So here you can see these are a bunch of push notifications sent from our partners. So here you can see Crema coffee. Buy one get half off ends Thursday again time limited offer works great. Where's dz? You know he's sending out really like he's built this whole relationship with his customers. You know obviously building a certain type of brand limited time offers special deals on, on special items, stuff like that. So he's doing a really good job with the push notifications. Obviously Starbucks drives a ton of business, you know with introducing new drinks around. You know a lot of it's around the fall. But doing that, you know having time limited menu Items is really. McDonald's also has a really good use case of this. They put their Sichuan sauce, they only make it available in the app and then they promote it on social media and, and it's, it's really successful and like this really viral thing. So you can do that as well. Like if you have special items, you know, introduce them through the app, get your super loyal customers, you know, maybe they have like an inside scoop on like your, I don't know what crazy drink it is, but your, you know, real fruit and ceremonial matches, same deal here, you can see with sweet green. But these are things that you can easily do. You can, you know, offer certain credits or certain coupons, send something out to people letting them know, hey, you can still use this today, so forth and so on. And then here you can see 25 off Pride specials, obviously with being Pride Month. And then, you know, you can whether you're putting the name of the promo, you're putting a month so people understand, hey, this only applies for this month, you know, but I think that's also a great way to do it. And then you can see here with El Famous Burrito, again, they have Taco Tuesday. So just a great way to, to get that. So, you know, whether it's Father's Day, you can see here double Munching Monday, you know, I think there's a ton of different promotions you can do. And then push notifications. This shouldn't be the only part of your arsenal. Email. You probably are going to have a bigger email list than a push notification list, but push notifications are going to tend to go to your most engaged users, your most loyal users, and the, you know, the ones that are most likely to convert. So I think that's, that's another thing. And then the last thing I was going to show you guys was, you know, right now, let's say if I go to our Washington D.C. location, I have created this promo code that should get me a free drink. It's a $5 off promo code. But again, within per diem, we can set up promo codes so that they're by location. So if I went to like our DC location, tried to apply it, then it's telling me, hey, this promo code isn't available at this location. And then if I haven't used this promo code already, you know, once I go and I order these drinks and I go to the Brooklyn location. Here, you can see that the discount got applied and we have the Brooklyn $5 off coupon. All right, I'm so happy that I'm going to add two more of those. And now let's add three more. And I just wanted to show you guys now when I check out paying with the credit card. So here's the post screen. And here, as I mentioned, we have like the gamification component. So again, this is something you can turn on as an evergreen thing or maybe it's just something you turn on on special occasions. Say it's a, it's a holiday, it's a Monday, whatever and then just a fun way to engage with your users and then okay, we can get another spin but the idea you get extra points and it's just another rewarding way and just a kind of a fun way to to use the app. And so yeah, on that note, I think that was most of our content for today. So yeah, that's basically everything. Not everything. There's a lot of other things that that obviously you'd be able to leverage but a lot of different strategies that you can use to drive business at non peak hours. And yeah, hit us up at Tripodium if you have any questions or want to see or have any ideas for ways that we can adopt new features to help you even more. All right, well thanks so much for joining this week and until next time, we'll see you later.