The outbreak of COVID-19 and lockdown deeply impacted the restaurant sectors, especially owners, employees, delivery staff, and everyone in the restaurant and food business. After this slowdown, now lockdown and restrictions slowly removing and people are starting to come out. This is a good sign for a cafe, and coffee shop business. So, cafe or coffee shop owners need to start bringing back more customers to their shops with some effective business strategies.

How to attract more customers

Let’s look at some effective strategies to attract customers to your café or coffee shop.

1) Charge affordable prices and offer discounts:

Trying to charge affordable prices for each item will give more customers to your shop. You can highlight this in your shop menu. Also, you can try weekend offers, weekday offers, buy one get one offers and combo offers to attract more customers into your café or coffee shop.

2) Social media marketing/promotions:

In this modern digital world, we can’t avoid social media. Social media marketing is all about connecting with your customers through social media platforms and helping them understand your business better. So, you need to make catchy and relevant posts frequently to remain connected with your customers. Using these social media platforms, you can freely post photos or videos of your dishes in social media to attract your customers even more. Also, you can use paid social media advertising methods for attracting more specific customers.

3) Website & email marketing:

If a customer is new to your cafe or coffee shop, then maybe they want to know about your shop, hours of operation, menu, contact numbers, locations, payment methods, and more before visiting. A good website gives them basic information about your business. So, always keep a good website for your business. Email marketing is an excellent way to reach your customers at a low cost. If you can collect customers’ emails, then you can send your customers weekly emails with unique and catchy content, it may be discounted offers, special dishes photos, coupon codes, weekly giveaways, or anything.

Also, read – Email Marketing for Restaurants: A Complete Guide

coffee shop business

4) Use loyalty programs:

A customer loyalty program is a program run by shops, that offers rewards, discounts, or other offers to their frequent customers. So, loyalty programs are encouraging customers to visit their favorite cafe or coffee shop again and again.

5) Use the point of sale system, and contactless menus:

A Contactless menu is a good solution to keep staff and customers safe from COVID-19. In a cafe or a coffee shop, we can keep these contactless menus as small tabletop postcards. So, customers can easily scan that and order items. A good point of sale system helps you to improve your business operations for your customers. This includes reducing customer waiting time, quicker payments, etc. In today’s fast-moving world, you will require good point-of-sale software like IVEPOS.

6) Offer gift cards, freebies, and free Wi-Fi:

Free Wi-Fi is important, this will make your customers always online, and also help customers to work or conduct meetings. Also, offering free gift cards and freebies to customers encourages them to visit cafes or coffee shops again.

7) The ambiance of the cafe or coffee shop:

Finally, we need to discuss the feel and ambiance of the cafe or coffee shop. To attract more customers to your shop then you need to ensure that everything is perfectly presented or not. If customers like your shop then they will stay longer and come back many times.