Contending to gain market leadership in the restaurant industry isn’t just about providing the best foods and services anymore. While these aspects of the business are essential, pricing always plays a vital role.
Pricing impacts your business. It either satisfies or demotivates your customers. Appropriate pricing boosts or decreases sales, including daily specials. This is where effective pricing strategies are crucial.
Pricing is also associated with winning prestigious food industry awards. If you’re willing to know more, read this article, which may serve as a guide for your restaurant business.
Roles of Daily Specials Apart
Daily specials are a way to attract new customers and establish a loyal customer base. Customers love to return to a restaurant that offers their favourite dishes at reduced prices on a particular day.
Hence, if you’re opting to strategise your pricing, daily specials should be an important area to focus on. Roles of daily specials in your restaurant are:
- Promoting Unique Dishes: Daily specials showcase new dishes to your customers, allowing them to try something different and share feedback. This testing helps you redesign your regular menu.
- Enabling Repeat Business: When customers try special dishes, they are excited to try them again soon, thus returning to your restaurant, encouraging repeat business.
- Increasing Profit Margins: Daily specials are a way to incorporate thoughtful ingredients and pricing to yield maximum profits for your business.
6 Pricing Strategies for Daily Specials to Boost Sales in a Restaurant
Since daily specials are a proven way to increase customer loyalty and repeat sales, your pricing strategies should work out to boost sales.
Below are seven pricing strategies for daily specials:
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Cost-Plus Strategy for Ensuring Profits
Cost-plus pricing is a common practice in which you mark up the cost by a margin that allows you to sell a dish at a reasonable profit. For instance, if your Fresh Shrimp Salad costs £7 to prepare, you may set its price to £10 to cover your cost while making a profit.
Cost-Plus pricing helps your restaurant business:
- Avoid loss or undervalued selling
- Offering customers reasonable prices for their favourite dishes
- Ensuring minimum or higher profits
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Implementing Competitive Prices
This one’s one of the toughest to implement. Competitive pricing requires extensive market research to set the optimum prices for your special dishes. It’s simply offering lower prices than your competitors.
For instance, you’ll offer £9.50 for your cinnamon rolls if your competitor is pricing them at £10.00. This will create oft-returning customers who appreciate lower prices for quality foods. However, once the competition is up, it may continue until you and your competitor start losing your profits.
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Psychological Pricing Strategy
It’s as the name suggests. A psychological pricing strategy is implemented based on reading your customers’ mindset. In other words, instead of using straightforward numbers in pricing, you set odd numbers, fractions, etc.
For example, you price your Chicken Tacos at £8.99 instead of £9.00 or £8.00. This creates an illusion in customers’ minds, making them think that it’s a better deal; hence, boosting sales.
Price anchoring is another tactic of psychological pricing. In this, you show two similar dishes on your menu vertically, the one with a higher price on top. Customers compare these two items and select the one with a lower price. This may work best in your online food ordering system.
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Value-Based Pricing
Value-based pricing deals with customers’ perceptions, conveying a greater value of a dish than its price. In other words, it’s about understanding how much your customers would pay for a special dish and setting the price accordingly.
Nonetheless, to make sure of it, you must:
- Bring Cultural Appeal: It’s important to realise what cultural influence your customers are seeking in your dishes. If your European or Indian dishes involve emotional attachment, customers are likely to pay more for them.
- Value Social Awareness: Customers today value organic or locally sourced ingredients. They advocate for sustainability. So, if you prepare your dishes with organic or locally sourced ingredients, customers will happily pay more for them.
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Setting Limited Time Offers
Another psychological impact you can have on your customers is by creating a sense of urgency. Hence, set limited-time offers for your daily specials, such as breakfast specials, lunch specials, dinner specials, etc.
Such limited-time offers will excite your loyal customers to visit your restaurant before it’s finished. They’ll either dine in or order takeaways or deliveries.
This pricing strategy will work best for an online food ordering system if you promote your limited-time offer on social media, online menus, or websites.
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Promoting Bundle Offers
Bundle offers are one of the customers’ favourite offers in terms of top dishes. However, you can add this strategy to your daily specials, too. Since daily specials are exclusive, bundle offers may increase sales even more.
Ways to offer bundles for your daily specials are:
- Combo Offer: While a main, side, beverage, and dessert will cost more separately, a combo offer of them will cost less. This discounted combo offer will intrigue customers while increasing your sales.
- Add-Ons: Besides combo offers, you may offer add-on items at additional prices. This will enhance customers’ meal experience while opening the path to more sales and profits.
Can Pricing Strategies Lead to Winning Restaurant Awards?
Yes, they do! Well-thought-out pricing strategies attract new customers and boost sales, and they also help restaurants win prestigious accolades.
Mindful and organised pricing can increase your restaurant’s reputation, showing the world your sense of business alongside culinary excellence and service.
Restaurant awards, such as the Asian Restaurant and Takeaway Awards (ARTA), dubbed ‘Oscar of the Curry Industry,’ nominate and honour restaurants with prolific business strategies and top-notch services.
By optimising your prices for daily specials, you showcase:
- Your knowledge of the dynamic restaurant industry trends;
- Your understanding of customer demand
- Your skills to ensure customer satisfaction
Final Words
If you’re planning to implement pricing strategies to boost your daily specials, try a few or all of the strategies mentioned above. The strategies mentioned in this article will help you optimise your menu, offer exclusive specials, and ensure the highest customer satisfaction.
Moreover, following these pricing strategies may also help you win international restaurant awards.
