Pub offers & promotions that really work
Are you looking to drive more traffic to your pub? While every pub has its loyal regulars, you may need to go further to get more customers in the door and keep them there, especially on quiet nights or during slow seasons.
Special offers and promotions to attract new customers and encourage more sales can definitely work for your pub, but you need to make sure you're choosing effective offers that convey value (but not cheapness) to your customers. You want to offer something special that really increases your trade and your customer loyalty. Here are a few of our favourite offers and promotions for pubs:
Happy Hours
This is obviously a classic and popular pub promotion. And with good reason - happy hours can draw customers into your pub at earlier times, and they might stay for more drinks after the happy hour period is over. If your happy hour includes cocktails, customers might continue drinking those higher-end options throughout the evening.
VIP Offers
It's basic psychology: people like to feel special. With the right tools, you can offer exclusive promotions only to customers that meet certain requirements - customers who sign up for your loyalty program, who have reached a target number of visits, or who hit a specific spending amount at your pub. These kinds of VIP offers can turn first-time customers into repeat visitors once they realise that they might earn a reward. And customers are becoming more used to the idea of "checking in" to businesses via social media, so they may be more receptive to signing up for a loyalty program than you'd expect.
Birthday Offer
Offering a simple birthday promotion, like a free pint with no strings attached, can draw in not only the birthday customer themselves, but any friends who are celebrating with them. You can ask customers to show their ID on their birthday to claim the offer, but if you already have birthdays on file through a loyalty scheme you can reach out to them as their birthday approaches. It might just make them choose to celebrate at your pub for the whole evening, bringing a large group with them.
Creative Discounts
While offering discounts can seem like a good promotional strategy, discounts can actually cheapen your brand and might not work as well as you hope. Instead, try offering something for free. For example, offering a free pint after buying two essentially results in three discounted pints. But the customer perceives that they're getting a special bonus pint instead of buying three discounted ones. It comes across as added value, and might encourage customer loyalty.
Discounts can sometimes be effective if you are debuting a new product and want to build excitement around it, but you need to be careful not to train customers to expect constant discounts at your pub.
Food and Drink Combinations
Offering a free drink when customers purchase a meal can be a great promotion, especially at lunchtime or slow weekday evenings. Customers will be more likely to buy food from you rather than leaving after one drink to head to the nearest chip shop. And they may also stay after their meal for at least one more drink.
Whether you stick with these promotion ideas or come up with creative options of your own, you'll need a bar EPOS system that can handle them smoothly at the till. With Tabology's Pub & Bar EPOS you can set up all of the above promotions and the relevant discounts are applied automatically at the till.
