The Power of Themed Menus

Singapore, with its vibrant culture and diverse population, is a melting pot of festive occasions. Restaurants that capitalize on these opportunities often reap significant rewards. Take National Day, for instance. During this time, red and white hues dominate the island, and the air is filled with patriotic fervor. As a public holiday, it presents a fantastic opportunity for restaurants to attract customers. Fast food chains like McDonald’s and Swensen’s, for example, seize this chance to create National Day-themed menus, adding a special touch to the celebration.

McDonald’s cleverly taps into local tastes with its National Day menu. By incorporating beloved hawker flavors into their burgers, like the Satay Beef and Chicken options, they cater to a wide audience. And let’s not forget the sweet tooth! With Coconut Cone, Coconut Oreo McFlurry, and Coconut Hot Fudge Sundae, they’ve ensured there’s something for everyone. This comprehensive approach, from savory to sweet, is a masterstroke.

Swensen’s also joins the National Day festivities with a menu that reflects Singapore’s multicultural heritage. Dishes like Nasi Lemak Burger and Dry Laksa Linguine are a delightful fusion of local flavors and Western cuisine. By offering a menu that appeals to multiple ethnicities, Swensen’s fosters a sense of unity and shared celebration.

It’s not just about food. Hopscotch, a craft cocktail bar, showcases the power of presentation. Their Lion City Tiki cocktail served in custom-made Merlion glassware, is a visual and tastebud-tingling experience. This unique offering captures the essence of Singapore and creates a memorable experience for locals and tourists alike.

A Year-Round Opportunity

While National Day is a highlight, the potential for special menus extends throughout the year.

• Lunar New Year: Offer prosperity-themed dishes, reunion set menus and auspicious desserts.
• Valentine’s Day: Create a romantic ambiance with aphrodisiac-inspired dishes and heart-shaped treats.
• Mother’s Day and Father’s Day: Show appreciation with special brunches, dinners, and personalized desserts.
• Hari Raya Puasa and Hari Raya Haji: Cater to Muslim customers with authentic flavors and festive packages.
• Christmas and New Year: Create a magical experience with festive decorations, special menus, and holiday cheer.

Beyond specific holidays, consider seasonal ingredients and themed events to keep your menu fresh and exciting.

However, if your restaurant cannot create a special themed menu for the occasion, it is still crucial to offer some form of promotion, as patrons are in a celebratory mood. For instance, on National Day, you could offer a complimentary drink or appetizer to patrons wearing red and white.

Key Takeaways

• Understand your audience: Tailor your menu to their preferences and expectations.
• Leverage local flavors: Incorporate ingredients and dishes that resonate with your customers.
• Create a memorable experience: Pay attention to presentation and ambiance.
• Promote your special menus: Utilize social media, email marketing, and in-store displays.
• Analyze performance: Track sales and customer feedback to refine your offerings.

By following these guidelines and drawing inspiration from successful case studies, you can transform your restaurant into a festive destination that delights customers and boosts your bottom line.

The post Maximizing Profit by Creating Special Menus for Holidays and Special Occasions appeared first on Restaurant Marketing Agency Singapore | V.SOP Design.

So why do you need to get a website for your restaurant?

Free Comes at a Price

However, be aware that you do not have full control over free social media platforms and they can close anytime without any notice. In other words, you can lose everything you build including your Facebook or Instagram fans. One thing to note is that all content such as latest news, promotion and announcement you posted on social media platform will not reach 100% of your customers due the frequent change of their algorithms and also, the engagement rate of your customers. If your customers do not like your posts, they could hide your posts so when the engagement rate is low, it is a total waste of time and effort as what you have posted will not see by all of your customers. This is one of the prices to pay for using free social media platforms.

Branding

In today’s world, every business is expected to have a website and restaurants are no exception. Customers view a restaurant who is willing to invest in a website is professionally managed and keep up with the time. This helps to elevate the restaurant’s brand image and increase its reputation.

In addition, the website plays an important role in time of crisis. For example, if there is any food poisoning incident or unfavorable rumors about your restaurant, this can be communicated quickly with details to your customers at your restaurant website. Facebook and Twitter are a good channel for timely updates but not suitable for lengthy detailed explanation of the incident. So don’t underestimate the power of a website, it will come in handy to salvage your brand reputation in times of crisis.

Virtual Storefront

Your restaurant website is like your virtual storefront. It contains basic information such as your operating hours, location, nearby carpark, menu and customers’ testimonials. Having all the essential information listed on your website will help to reduce the needs to answer frequently asked questions.

It is also a great platform to showcase your restaurant offering and unique selling proposition. Tell your customers why you are different from your competitors and why they should come to you. For example, if you are selling Indian cuisine, you may elaborate on how you are different than the rest in terms of food, services, price, ambience or specialty.

Easy Accessibility and Directions

A restaurant website also makes it easier for potential customers to discover your restaurant. Imagine someone hears about your eatery from a friend and wants to learn more before visiting. Their first stop would likely be your website. Without one, you risk losing that customer. A well-designed website can provide essential information, including your location, contact details, and directions. For restaurants situated in remote areas, this feature becomes even more crucial. Patrons can find out which public transport options to take, which MRT exits lead to your location, or which bus stops align with your restaurant. By offering clear directions, you enhance the overall customer experience and increase the chances of foot traffic to your restaurant.

Online Visibility

Your customers are searching for your restaurant online so if you do not have a website, your customers can easily turn to your competitors for business. This is especially so when you are in a competitive F&B industry.

For example, if you are a Japanese restaurant in Singapore, simply google for “Japanese restaurant Singapore” and you can see billions of search results. This shows the amount of competition you are facing and if you do not have a website, your restaurant will never have a chance to be found online.

On the other hand, if you have a website, you can actively promote it to get backline from industry partners, review websites and blogs to increase your online visibility.

In the long term, when your restaurant website has gained enough authority, backlinks, and organic online traffic, it becomes a valuable online asset. It is your earned media asset and if one day when Facebook and Instagram are gone, you still have a website to promote your restaurant business.

Besides, it is a good form of free advertisement as you can eliminate expensive brand advertising and still be visible in customers’ minds.

Omni Channel / Multi Touch Points

Today, customers can get to know about your restaurant from many other platforms such as social media channels, review websites, online news, or blogs. From these channels, it is easy to drive them to your restaurant website if they are interested in finding out more about your offering and food.

The restaurant website is so far, the only platform that allows you to describe your restaurant’s history, facilities, management, crew, services, and menu in detail. It will be even more interesting if you have an interesting restaurant story to share with your potential customers. The best channel to share is still the website platform as the web pages are easy to find, navigate, and access.

Your restaurant website will set the mood of ambience, service, and food before your customers set foot in your restaurant. You can also add happy customers reviews for your restaurant on your website to encourage more new customers to visit you.

Therefore, don’t omit the restaurant website just because there are many free online channels available out there. Your restaurant website is another multi-touch point that customers get to know and connect with you.

Responsive Restaurant Website

An optimal restaurant website needs to be responsive and adapt to the size of different electronic reading devices. This means that your website will scale according to your customer’s desktop or mobile devices without causing any readability issues. The content such as food images, menus, and location maps will scale without any distortion even when the customers are looking at their phones.

This is especially important for restaurants as most of the customers use mobile phones to search for the desired restaurant website. See below online traffic statistics for one of our customers. The number of mobile phone users is higher than any other electronic device:

Therefore, it is highly recommended to get a responsive website to cater for the bulk of traffic come from mobile phones.

Optimize Website for Sales

Many restaurants made the mistake of thinking the website is only meant for information purposes. Your restaurant website can turn into a powerful sales and automation tool if you know what powerful features to add to it.

For example, if your restaurant is selling secret sauces or has a takeaway menu, you can add ecommerce functionality to your website and allow customers to order online and collect from your restaurant. This adds revenue for your restaurant even when it is in full capacity.

To better manage your seating capacity, a table reservation system can be added so that customers can book online in advance to confirm their seats early.

Many restaurants are not doing customer segmentation so they are not targeting their customers properly with the right marketing messages and offers.

A sales funnel, email marketing, and analytical tracking functionality can be added to the restaurant website to auto-segment your customers based on the attributes you defined. It could be based on the demographic, frequency, location, or traits of the customers. The report from these tools will help you gain better insights into customers’ preferences and by segmenting them into the right categories, you can align what they want precisely.

So instead of just being a static and reactive website, a powerful and trackable restaurant website can help you to achieve a lot more than sales.

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Now you can see the reason why you need a restaurant website and you also see the potential ability of what it can do for your restaurant business so don’t hesitate, to start early and invest in a website today!

Do you need help with your Restaurant website?
Check out our restaurant website design packages here or contact us if you have any questions.

The post Why Restaurant should have a Website? appeared first on Restaurant Marketing Agency Singapore | V.SOP Design.

Restaurant marketing starts too late is one of the common mistakes made by new restaurant owners. They normally wait until they open their physical restaurants before they start to think how to market their new restaurants. After all, who would ever think of restaurant marketing when one has thousands of things to complete before the restaurant officially launch. New restaurant owner generally believe things will start to pick up when the restaurant opens.

Unfortunately, restaurant businesses are extremely competitive in Singapore, it might be a little too late to think of how to attract customers when the restaurant starts operation. Every day, there will be a lot of challenges that need the restaurant owner’s attention and hence restaurant marketing will normally be the last in the to-do list.

If you are one of the new restaurant owners, do not make the same mistake and start to do your restaurant promotions as early as possible to increase the success rate of your restaurant.

In this post, we are going to look at some marketing tactics on how to market a new restaurant before it even open its door.

1. Start Building Brand Awareness
2. Build Up Customer Database
3. Build Up and Secure Your Online Assets Early
4. Know Your Target Customer Beforehand
5. Get Media Attention

The above marketing tactics are essential to build the foundation of your restaurant before opening so invest some time doing them well rather than leaving them to the last.

Here are the details.

Start Building Brand Awareness

You can start creating your brand early and develop brand awareness even before your restaurant open. It’s good to set up your restaurant’s Facebook business page as soon as you confirm your restaurant location.

Use the Facebook page to provide interesting story about your restaurant to attract Facebook followers. For example, update your Facebook followers with news such as the-behind-the-scene of your restaurant renovation, recruitment and team development. Turn your Facebook followers into fans so that when the restaurant opens, they can help to spread the news to their friends and families. Word of mouth is more effective than advertising as people trust the recommendation from their friends and family than a commercial advertising.

Build Up Customer Database

As mentioned above, when you start to build your own list of customers by using the email marketing for restaurants, you are more in control of your own restaurant marketing and promotion. It will save you massive advertising cost which can cost from few hundred to thousand dollars per ad campaign. In contrast, email marketing only cost less than $30 per month for basic plan.

By using the auto-scheduling and mass email blasting feature in email marketing, you can grow your customer database further with the following marketing tactics:

1. 1. By offering discount on special occasion e.g. birthday, anniversary or job promotion.
   2. Invite friends and family members as a group to enjoy table discount.
   3. Excusive invitation for your subscribers.

Build Up and Secure Your Online Assets Early

What is your online assets? They are your website, blog and social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. These online assets help to place your restaurant on the online space and allow your potential customers to find and reach your restaurant easily.

It is important to develop and secure your online assets early, for example the domain name of your website. You may come out with an impressive restaurant name but the domain name could have been already taken by some other restaurants. This will both cause confusion to your potential customers and affect your brand identity.

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Website
Many new restaurant owners do not think a website is a must since they can have a free Facebook page or other social media platform to promote their new restaurants. You are missing a lot if you think this way as you are not leveraging the power of a website.

Having a well-designed website not only help in your brand image but also helps to improve your search result ranking in different search engines. If your restaurant website is well optimized for certain keywords, it will be listed top in the search result amid other competitors. For example, if your restaurant is offering “Traditional Japanese Dining” and your website appear on the first position of the search result when customers are searching for it, congratulation! Your restaurant will get more chance to be visited than your competitors.

In addition, the website is an excellent lead generator and can be used to collect your potential customers’ email address. Once you have a database of customers’ email address, you are already half a battle won.  This will help to manage your restaurant seating capacity in future.

Know Your Target Customer Beforehand

You must know what type of customers you want to attract to your restaurant and know what they want so that you can customize the restaurant menu, serving and marketing messages specifically for them. Every restaurants attract different type of customers such as the family, dating couples, office workers, corporate diners and casual diners.

In each group of customers you can further segment them so that you can further target them as your niche market. For example, for the “Office Workers” segment, you can break them down into different diners as follow:

New Restaurant Customers Segmentation

From the above chart, you can see that there are many ways to sub-segment your customers. For instance, if you are targeting “Health-Conscious Diner” market, you can come out with a Vegetarian menu or a Low Carb menu.

When you have your own database of customers, you can easily survey them to get even more details such as their demographics, preferences and even their special dietary requirement. The surveying can be done either by a survey software or email marketing software which has the automatic capability to segment customers based on their preferences. As a result, you can gain insights of your customers and personalise menu and dining experience for them.

Get Media Attention

The restaurant website and social media channel are good places to showcase your restaurant décor, crews and menu. Each restaurant will have an interesting story to share especially when the restaurant owner who is passionate about food and cooking will have a lot to share with the social media followers. Let them feel your passion and love of food and they are more willing to help to spread your love too.

All these information you put on social media platforms will be indexed permanently in the search engines and they will be found on the online space if you have placed the right keywords or unique Hastag e.g. #lowcarbmenu in your posts. Engaging posts will be liked and shared virally on social media platform; they can help you to earn media attention which is another good publicity to your restaurant so it’s worth to plan early than later.

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In order to survive in this competitive F&B industry, one has to be creative and need to move fast. New restaurant owner must be able to think ahead and try out marketing strategy that other restaurants might have overlooked. The above marketing tactics are surprisingly simple and yet easy to implement. They can help to develop your competitive advantage earlier and set your restaurant apart from the rest of competitors.

What’s your thought on this, feel free to leave a comment below.

The post New Restaurant Mistakes: Restaurant Marketing Starts Too Late appeared first on Restaurant Marketing Agency Singapore | V.SOP Design.

How do you get more customers for your restaurant?

This is the most frequently asked questions for restaurant owners yet there is no straight answer. The main reason is different restaurants require different marketing tactics to work as there are many contributing factors to consider such as the restaurant's target customers, food, location and services. In short, there is no one size fits all marketing tactics for every restaurants.

Nevertheless, if you are curious what are the successful restaurant promotion tactics being used by successful restaurants? Here is a list of them.

The post Restaurant Promotion Ideas: Effective Tactics to Build More Customers for Restaurant appeared first on Restaurant Marketing Agency Singapore | V.SOP Design.

All these templates are beautifully designed and can be set up quickly without burning a hole in your pocket. They are meant to cut down the development time of a website so you can have your online cake shop set up immediately. Click on the “View Demo” below each website template and get a feel how it looks and works, you may find one lovely website template that suit your cake business.

#1. Cake Art Website Template

This responsive cake website template comes with full ecommerce feature so it is suitable for those cake shops or bakery who want to set up an online shop for ordering and payment. It allows you to add different categories and as many cakes as you like for online ordering. Customers are able to filter their search of cakes by price and see the top sale products. The template has a review system where customers could leave their reviews and comments. Another feature you will like is the “Recipes” or “Blog” section where you can share your beloved recipes with your customers and interact with them.

Since it is responsive template, it will look good at desktop, tablet or smartphone screens.

Price: USD59

View Demo | Buy Here

#2. The Cakery Website Template

The cakery website template is for new cake shops who just want a single page website. It has minimum e commerce features but you still can add a simple ordering form for customers to order online. Ideal for cake shop owner who want to put the bare essential information about his or her cake shop when just started up. This cake website template also come with a Google map so customers could locate your store easily even though you are a new store.

Price: USD49

View Demo | Buy Here

#3. Just Shop Website Template

This is an ecommerce and responsive cake website template for cake shops who want to sell and collect payment online. It is on WordPress platform and has one-click installation which make it easy to install and setup. The template is highly customizable as it has features such as multiple header options, page builder, slider revolution and 6 built-in colours so you can set your preference with just a few clicks.

Price: USD59

View Demo | Buy Here

#4. Cute Cake Website Template

A cheerful and animated cake wordpress theme for cake shops who want to portray not the usual cake shop image. This is a one-page website design template and is ideal for new cake shops and bakery when there is not much web content yet. Since it is a single page website template, it makes the website load faster and easier to maintain. In addition, it is especially intuitive to use for mobile phone users as there are less pages to navigate and less chance they are stuck in multiple pages website. However if you are concerned you are not getting enough organic traffic with one-page website template then writing new content in the blog will help you to overcome this problem. It has a blog feature where you can start generate fresh content to attract website visitors.

Price: USD44

View Demo | Buy Here

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The above cake website templates are ideal for cake shop owners who are tech savvy and wish to install and DIY themselves. However, if you find it is a hassle and wish to engage a professional to take care everything from getting a domain name, website hosting to installation of the template, you can talk to us. Contact us today for a detailed discussion.

The post Beautiful Cake Website Templates appeared first on Restaurant Marketing Agency Singapore | V.SOP Design.

There are many type of menus available and you might feel overwhelmed with the number of options as which one is right for you but you can decide based on your needs, budget and usage.

For every new restaurants or cafes, it is important to watch your expenses so you will need a menu which is easy to maintain and update and one of these menu is the Transparent PVC menu folders. It is sometimes known as clear menu folders or menu covers and they are made of PVC material which hold and protect the printed menu paper like a laminated menu.

The PVC material is harder type of plastic and is waterproof so make the menu folder easy to maintain. In addition, they are affordable and durable so you will not need to spend a fortune on designing and printing of a menu as you can print out your updated menu easily from your own printer and slot the printed sheet into the PVC menu folders.

Most importantly, as a new restaurant or cafes, it gives you time to test out your menu to get the most saleable food items and drinks before you invest on a premium menu.

Overview of Transparent PVC Menu Folder

It is sometimes called Clear Menu Folder or Transparent PVC menu folders and they come in different sizes, pages and style. The most popular size is Letter size (21.59 cm x 27.94 cm) or A4 size (21 cm x 29.7 cm) menu folder so that you can print your own menu sheet (also called printed insert) and fit nicely into the folder.

The most commonly found transparent PVC Menu Folders includes the following:

Single Panel Menu Folder with Two Views

This one sheet transparent menu folder allows you to slot in two printed menu paper back-to-back or a single sheet paper with double-side printing. It is excellent menu folder for new restaurants or cafes who do not have too many food or drink items. Customers can flip and view quickly from front to back or vice versa without spending too much time on ordering.

Size: Letter size (21.59 cm x 27.94 cm)
Page: 1 page with 2 views (front & back)
Color: Black
Get this Single Panel Menu Folder from Amazon

Double-Panel Clear Menu Folders

The two pages clear menu folders is designed to hold four sheet of printed menu paper back-to-back or two sheet of double-sided printed menu. The corners of the menu is protected by bold brass corner protectors. It is waterproof and easy to maintain thus making it one of the most popular menu folders among the new restaurants and cafes.

Size: Letter size (21.59 cm x 27.94 cm)
Color: Black
Pages: 2 pages with 4 views
Get this Double-Panel Clear Menu Folders from Amazon

Three-Panel Menu Folder (3-Fold Format)

The three-fold transparent menu folder is an extension to two pages menu folder; it is ideal when there are more food and drink items you want to offer in your restaurant or café but still want to keep the menu neat and orderly.

It can contain six sheet of single printed menu back-to-back or 3 sheet of double-sided menu. It is recommended that you use a thicker paper such as 80 gsm paper or above for double-side printing so that no ink smears while printing.

Size: Letter size (21.59 cm x 27.94 cm)
Color: Black
Pages: 3 pages with 6 views
Get this Three-Panel Menu Folder from Amazon

Five-Panel Menu Folder (Booklet Format)

The five pages clear folder is designed to hold 10 sheets of menu back-to-back or 5 sheets of double-sided printing menu. This five panel clear folder is binded together like a booklet so you can categorize your food and drink items clearly in each page. Customers will find it easier and quicker to browse from individual category than reading the whole menu for a specific food item.

Size: Letter size (21.59 cm x 27.94 cm)
Color: Black
Pages: 5 pages with 10 views
Get this Five-Panel Menu Folder from Amazon

Restaurant Menu Leather Cover

If you have VIP guests coming to your restaurant or cafe, you may want to make your transparent menu folder looks more presentable to impress them.

You can quickly attach a leather menu cover to your existing transparent menu folder and instantly your plain-looking menu folder is transformed to a classy and elegant-looking menu.

In addition, you can print or emboss your restaurant or café logo on to the front of the menu to add the premium touch. The leather menu cover can be attached and detached easily to the clear menu folder using two pins at the top and bottom of the page. This gives you the flexibility of catering both to your VIP guests as well as your normal rushing patrons.

You can either buy these clear menu folder from the shop and insert your own printed menu or get the professional menu designer or commercial printer to help you.

The professional designer will design the menu and let the commercial printer print out and slot them into the folders for you nicely. You can even request them to be delivered right to your doorsteps for a small fee.

However, majority of the printers have minimum quantity requirement such as 20 or 30 copies so do check out with the printers before printing.

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Hope you find the above useful.

If you need any help on menu designing, you are welcome to contact us with your requirement.

The post Transparent PVC Menu Folders aka Menu Covers appeared first on Restaurant Marketing Agency Singapore | V.SOP Design.

With today’s technology, many F&B stores might have an online ecommerce stores but not many stores owners have the budget and knowledge to handle an online stores. In addition, a fully-fledged ecommerce website cost time and money to develop so retailers are not willing to take the risks. Fortunately, there is alternative – social ecommerce platform is another cheaper solution and one of the most commonly used platform is Facebook. Majority of the businesses have already set up a Facebook business page so if you are one of them, you could leverage the power of Facebook platform to sell more CNY goodies and cookies in this coming Chinese New Year.

How it works?

You will need to integrate a third-party software such as Beetailer.com into your Facebook business page so that you can display your CNY goodies and cookies like an online catalog. The integration is fast and does not overload your Facebook page but you have to pay a fee to use their services. For beginners, they have a free plan where you can display free 30 products in your Facebook store. This is a good chance for you to try out first and sign up a more robust plan once your bakery business grow.

Your visitors or customers can browse and order directly without leaving your Facebook shop. This helps to increase sales as they are not distracted by asking them to complete transaction elsewhere. At the same time, customers are given the option to make payment first upon checkout so saving you worries of not able to collect money later.

Setting Up a Facebook Shop

When you sign up with Beetailer.com, you need to fill in all your shop particulars and payment mode details. The only time consuming part is to fill up your product name, description and pricing plus your products pictures.

However, once the above are done, it is quite easy to link up your Facebook page in its dashboard. Publish your store when it is ready to show the public and your Facebook storefront will look like the screenshot as below. Your visitors will see a “Shop” or “Order Here” tab at your Facebook.

After visitors click on the item they like, they can either click “Continue Shopping” or “Proceed Checkout” to checkout.

The next screen shows a pop-up form to ask visitors to enter their information. This will save you time and efforts getting full particulars from your customers.

After entering all the particulars, the visitors will be asked to make payment. There are few options available; they can pay by cash upon delivery, Paypal, bank transfer and credit card. You would need to sign up with Stripe.com as a payment processor for credit card processing and they charge 2.9% and $0.3 cents for every successful charge. But good news they do not charge any other monthly fee except transaction fee.

Once the visitor successfully completed the checkout process, you will receive an order in the email which look like the following:

All the customer’s details are clearly captured in the order form so there is less risk for writing errors. Customers can access your Facebook shop even after your operating hours so it provides ease and convenience for them.

The above ordering and checkout processes will be automatic once they are set up in the Facebook, you will just need to check your email regularly for the incoming order. This allows you to focus more time now on baking of CNY goodies and cookies instead of doing all the admin and paper works.  Doing what you enjoy most and bake more delicious cookies is the cornerstone of having more happy customers and business success. So add a Facebook shop to your Facebook page today, it could be new horsepower to your bakery business.

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If you decide to set up a Facebook store and do not want to get your hands dirty messing with the setting, give us a call or email. We can help you to set up fast to meet your Chinese New Year sale goal.

The post Facebook Store: How to Sell More CNY Cookies Online in 2016 appeared first on Restaurant Marketing Agency Singapore | V.SOP Design.

Many restaurants are actually competing for the same group of customers so in order to maintain long-term sustainability for your restaurant, it is important to develop your own inhouse customer database. Always remember to ask for your first-time customers’ contact information such as email for future communication.

This will not only help you to build your own customer database (also known as mailing list) but it’s also a good way to interact with your customers frequently to maintain your visibility in their minds.

You can now lure them back frequently to your restaurant with some good deals or promotion than waiting passively for them to come back.

Using Email Marketing Tool

One of the excellent tools used to build customer database is email marketing tool. Many people have the misconception that email marketing tool is only used to blast out email messages or special promotion only but in fact, it has a lot more features.

For example, it includes the following:

1. Email sign-up form
2. Autoresponder
3. Email marketing tracking
4. Subscribers segmenting
5. Detailed subscribers profile
6. Ready-made email template

Most email service providers provide email marketing tool with the above features. One of them is Constant Contact, it is popular among many restaurants as its email marketing tool is easy to use and affordable.

You can build a successful customer database like others by following the below methods.

Steps to Build up Your Restaurant Customer Database

1. Add a Sign-up Form at Your Website
   You can add a sign-up form (or capturing form) at your website to capture your website visitors’ names and emails before they leave. The sign-up form can be placed in different location at your website. It can be either at your right-hand sidebar, a pop-up sign-up form or slide-up form at the bottom of the page. In addition, you can have a page just solely dedicate for signing up of new customers and it is commonly called a landing page. To encourage your customers to sign up, you need to offer some baits for example, a good birthday discount, membership program, new menu promotion and special occasion offer.
2. Add a Capture Form at Your Facebook
   Similarly, if you are active in social media platform like Facebook, you can utilize the opportunity to capture email of your Facebook fans and followers by adding a sign-up form tab in your Facebook. Once they become your mailing list subscribers, you can then encourage them to forward your email to their family, friends or colleagues so that you can capture more new subscribers to your mailing list.
3. Use Autoresponder to Automate Your Email Message
   One of the best parts of using email marketing tool is its autoresponder. It is used to automate the process of constantly sending a series of email messages to new subscribers without human intervention. The series of email messages can be set to be sent on a few days, weeks or months apart.

   A good example of such email messages is an invitation to your new subscribers to try out a 1-for-1 promotion to encourage them to bring their partners, family or friends to try on your featured menu every week.

Use Offline Methods to Complement Online Email Capturing Efforts

If you are new in creating a customer database, you may like to use offline methods to complement your online email capturing efforts so you can achieve your goal faster.

1. Use QR Code
   Add a QR code to your promotional banner and place it at your main entrance. The QR code must direct the customers to your website and show them the sign-up form. To motivate customers to scan their phones on the QR code, you can offer some instant freebies like drink or appetizer to sign up your mailing list.
2. Use Sign-Up Card
   Alternatively, you can distribute a physical sign-up card to your customers while waiting for their foods. Let the customers know they will be joining your mailing list and they will be informed of the latest restaurant’s promotion, discount and special offer via email. The size of the card can be A6 size which should give plenty of room for writing. If the customer has a name card, this would save you the hassle of keying the data so ask for it first before giving them the sign-up card.
3. Publish your Sign-up Form Address in your Marketing Collaterals
   If your restaurant is doing catering and meal takeout delivery, it is good to publish your sign-up form address in your name card and brochures. These brochures could be distributed to your customer’s guests so if any one who like your food, they could sign up directly via your website or Facebook to receive latest information about your catering.

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It may take some time to build up a decent size of customer database but the effort will be worthwhile once you have successfully built one.

You can then frequently communicate, interact and get feedback from your customers. Find out what they like and dislike about your food, service, staff and restaurant to make improvement.

You will soon realize that having your own customer database will help you to save in advertising and PR costs. Most importantly, your customers from your own database will be more responsive and loyal than those you get from random advertising.

If you are interested to sign up for an email marketing tool, click here to try it free for 60 days.

The post How to Use Email Marketing Tool to Build Your Restaurant Customer Database appeared first on Restaurant Marketing Agency Singapore | V.SOP Design.

Bigcommerce is a complete ecommerce solution where it has the ready-made storefront template, product catalog, order management, shopping cart, payment gateway, marketing tools and online report. You can see other features by visiting Bigcommerce here.

To give you a better idea of how other coffee beans sellers are using Bigcommerce ecommerce software to set up their online coffee stores, here are some examples.

#1. Bonfire Coffee

Bonfire Coffee has good relationship with coffee farmers and strive to bring premium roasted coffee beans to its customers worldwide. Bonfire Coffee categorized its coffee into organically grown coffees, blends, single origins and seasonal coffees and packed them into different sizes and weights so that customers can order them easily online. The online store used Bigcommerce “sort by” feature where its customers can quickly sort the coffee beans based on popularity, latest product or pricing.

#2. Orazure

Orazure has a more detailed categorization than the previous ecommerce store. Its coffee beans are categorized by “Taste”, “Region” and “Type” where it gives customers more option while purchasing. Orazure made good use of its “Related Items” section by showing high quality photographs of related items. (Note: The “related items” is one of Bigcommerce features and it appears at the bottom of detailed product description page to encourage cross sell and up sell). This is a good feature in ecommerce store as it encourages more sales to be generated.

#3. New York Gourmet Coffee

New York Gourmet Coffee is directly targeting at consumers where freshly roasted coffee beans are promised. Besides the usual flavored coffees, specialty coffee and signature blends, customers can even order decaffeinated coffee beans online. New York Gourmet Coffee also offers many different grind style for its coffee beans and it is clearly shown in its ordering page so customers will have no problem when ordering it.

#4. Bean Direct

Compared to the above three ecommerce sites, Bean Direct is one of the rare sites bother to collect email address from its visitors. It made use of a third party software called “S Loyalty” and integrated into Bigcommerce platform to build up its mailing list. Bean Direct used one of the Bigcommerce ready-made template for its storefront but yet it still look unique and clean.

#5. Chromatic Coffee Co.

Chromatic Coffee Co. also utilized Bigcommerce template for its storefront and its minimum look and feel make its product stand out even more prominently. It also has a blog section, this is built in in Bigcommerce so you do not need to get an external blog platform like wordpress or blogger for your ecommerce blog.

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Some of the above online coffee stores have customized their storefront design but there are a few who are happy and used the ready-made templates available in Bigcommerce. You can see some of the above coffee ecommerce stores have put in great efforts in photographing their products with good packaging but some do not. It makes a lot of difference when you are selling online as customers buy based on the picture of your products so make sure you invest some good time and money to get your products look as impressive as possible.

You are welcome to test on Bigcommerce for 15 days, click on the banner to sign up a trial account now.

The post Selling Coffee Bean Online? Look at these Inspiring Coffee eCommerce Websites First appeared first on Restaurant Marketing Agency Singapore | V.SOP Design.

Most of the websites or blogs today are built on WordPress as it is flexible, quick to install and easy to update content for not so tech-savvy users. Most importantly, WordPress uses themes (some people called it template but technically it should call themes) to control the look and feel of the website and you can change the theme easily with a click. In other words, your website can have different designs layout in a matter of second without the hassle of designing from scratch.

Below is a list of cake shop template for wordpress platform. You can click on “Demo” to view the individual themes on how it works. Alternatively, click on “Buy Now” to purchase the theme and set up the website immediately.

Bake-a-cake WordPress Theme

A beautiful pinkish cake shop template is designed for cake shop owner who are selling a wide range of pretty and delectable cakes, cupcakes and pastries. It provides all the necessary pages so you can provide all the details so your potential customers can browse through your website for what you have offer. It has a “Gallery” page where you can showcase all your products at one place, check out the demo to see more.

See Demo | Buy here

Sweet Cake WordPress Theme

Sweet Cake theme is a responsive WordPress theme, meaning the layout of the website will adapt to different screen sizes when it is viewed on different devices. The theme adopts a single-page navigation so it saves the troubles from navigating from page to page. This will be ideal when view in smaller devices like smartphone as it saves time from downloading the page.

See Demo here | Buy Now

Justshop Cake WordPress Theme

Just like the first theme, this Justshop cake WordPress theme is also responsive but it has additional ecommerce capability. If you are the cake shop owner and you would like your customers to order cake online, this WordPress theme is just right for you. An ecommerce website will normally take some time to develop so when using this WordPress theme, it will help you to save massive times and costs. In addition, this theme is very affordable so you can use it to test out your online market before deciding on a full-blown ecommerce website. You will be even delighted to know there are 6 colors to choose from this theme so you can pick the best color to suit your cake shop.

See Demo here | Buy Now

WindCake WordPress Theme

Like the first WordPress theme, this is another one-page theme where visitors can scroll vertically to see everything in one page. It has a blog section where you can constantly create new post to update about your bakery or cake shop. You can post announcement, news and even video about your latest cake creation and addition. A blog is normally liked by search engines so if you post fresh content regularly, your cake shop website will rank higher in the search engine result. In other words, the chance of finding your cake shop in the search engines will be higher than your competitors.

See Demo here | Buy Now

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The WordPress theme can be easily apply to your website if you are in the WordPress platform. If you are not happy with the theme, you can change it anytime but the above themes mentioned allow you to make some customization so you are not too limited by the pre-made WordPress theme.

The post Creative Cakes Responsive WordPress Themes appeared first on Restaurant Marketing Agency Singapore | V.SOP Design.