New ideas for Coffee Shop promotion #2
When you’re running a coffee shop, competition can be fierce.
If you’re not fighting for first place on the high street, you’re fighting to become the go-to coffee shop in your local community. And if you’re not ready to really fight for it, you can’t expect to keep your seats full all week long.
You’re not selling a proprietary technology. You’re selling a commodity. And that means you need to try out every trick in the book if you want to stand out against the massive coffee corporations.
We’ve put together 10 ideas to get your marketing strategy off the ground: starting from your own premises and working outwards to the wider community.
Talking about all the ideas is a lengthy matter. So we have initiated a series of blogs to talk about some of them each time. This is the second blog of this series. If you miss the first one, you can it see here.
Inside the shop
3. Create life-long customers with rewarding loyalty cards
There’s a reason we’ve seen cards like these in just about every retail shop or a casual eatery.
It’s because they work.
When customers have so many other convenient places to get a coffee or a bite to eat, you need to give them a solid reason to come back to your particular business.
Loyalty cards do just that. Every time a customer buys a coffee in your shop, they get a stamp or a hole punched on their card. Every ten coffees they buy gets them the eleventh one for free. Simple.
Now for the interesting part.
Once someone has a loyalty card, they’re walking around with an advert for your coffee shop in their wallet. Every time they use a cash machine or buy something in another shop, they’re reminded of your business and the fact that they’ve almost earned a free coffee.
On top of that, their friends and family have a chance to see your card every time that person opens their wallet. So if you treat your loyalty card like a traditional poster or advert, you have a real opportunity to get the attention of new customers, without spending a penny on buying advertising space.
Of course, if you’re going to use a customer’s wallet for advertising space, you’ll need a card that’s tough enough to survive and still look smart after a few months of use – like a card with which is gloss laminated one side for extra durability, the other side is uncoated so perfect for rubber stamping.
Eye-catching loyalty card designs to keep customers coming back
Design a durable, colorful and eye-catching loyalty card with your special offers and address on the back, and let your current customers do your marketing for you.
4. Promote your offers (and your style) with high-quality posters
Most coffee shop customers won’t pour through the whole menu to calculate the best deals. They’re not buying a new car – they’re just here for a drink and a bite.
So when they arrive, they’ll often go for the first attractive thing they see. And that means you have a real opportunity to put your highest-profit drinks and special offers right under their noses.
Get some big, bright and colorful posters that push the deals and offers you’d like to sell more of, and put them up in the places where a visitor’s eye falls to first – in the central window of your front door, above and behind where your baristas work, and next to the door to your toilets.
Bold posters displaying the latest offers
With small batches of printed posters every month or so, you can keep on experimenting with different offers and deals until you find the ones that work best. And it’s also a chance to keep rotating some low-cost decorations, with vibrant designs and styles that match the ambiance or theme of your coffee shop.
So what’s next?
The best time to start promoting your coffee shop is now.
There are countless different ways to get customers through the doors, and you’ll need to try a few different methods before you find what works best with your market and your way of doing business.
