10 Restaurant Customer Acquisition Strategies That Will Boost Growth

Your first job as a new restaurateur is to figure out creative ways to attract customers and get them to try your food. Below, we’ve prepared a detailed guide to restaurant customer acquisition, from its costs and benefits to ways of making it work.

What Is Restaurant Customer Acquisition?

Customer acquisition is the process of attracting new customers and getting them to make a purchase. As a restaurant owner, your main goal is to make customers aware of your brand so they can visit your restaurant or place an order online.

What Is the Customer Acquisition Cost for Restaurants?

The customer acquisition cost refers to how much it costs for a business to acquire a customer through marketing. To calculate the restaurant customer acquisition cost, you need to decide on the marketing budget dedicated to attracting new customers.

Then, it’s a simple matter of applying this formula:

Customer Acquisition Cost = Marketing Cost / New Customers

We can’t talk about the ideal customer acquisition cost (CAC) without also discussing the customer lifetime value (CLV). The latter refers to the total profits you can expect to make from a customer throughout your entire relationship.

To calculate the lifetime value of a restaurant customer, you need to multiply the customer value by the average customer lifespan.

To calculate the customer value, you need to multiply the average purchase value by the average frequency rate. Then, to calculate the average customer lifespan, divide the average number of years a customer is active by the total number of customers.

After you have those two values, you can calculate their lifetime value (CLV).

Once you’ve calculated the CLV, let’s see what is a good customer acquisition cost for restaurants. Ideally, that should be three times lower than the customer lifetime value.

For example, if your customer lifetime value is $30, you should have a customer acquisition cost of about $10.

3 Benefits of Customer Acquisition for Restaurants

Without customer acquisition, your restaurant wouldn’t be able to grow and develop. Here’s why you should focus on attracting new customers:

1. Brings in sales: More customers lead to an increase in your income and restaurant profit margin.
2. Improves brand awareness: Customers who become aware of your brand are more likely to come back for more.
3. Leads to expansion possibilities: The more customers you have, the more chances for you to expand your business into a new location or explore different menu items.

10 Restaurant Customer Acquisition Strategies

1. Get a restaurant website that’s optimized for search engines

One of the best ways for potential customers to find you online is to build a restaurant website that is designed to help you rank high in Google and other search engines.

For that, you need SEO (search engine optimization), a practice that involves improving your website to increase its visibility. The goal is to direct customers looking for your type of restaurant in their area to your website.

Now, you could pay an expensive developer to help you build a website, but that is going to eat up a lot of your customer acquisition budget. A better alternative is to generate an SEO-optimized restaurant website yourself in minutes with no prior tech knowledge. Here’s how:

2. Be active on social media

Social media is a great restaurant customer acquisition tool because it’s free and accessible to all. Create social media accounts on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to increase your restaurant’s visibility online.

However, having social media profiles for your restaurant is not enough. You need to post regularly and engage with your followers to increase reach and persuade them to visit your restaurant.

Social media is also a great booster for your website. You can link it in your bio and add your URL to posts to redirect customers to where they can browse your menu or place an order online.

3. Offer online ordering

Restaurant customer acquisition is not limited to dine-in. In fact, limiting yourself to dine-in sales only would be a mistake because there’s only so much you can sell daily considering seating is limited.

Expand your revenue streams by accepting orders online on your website. Our website builder mentioned above comes with built-in online ordering for free, but if you want to add an Order button to your existing restaurant website, follow these steps:

4. Create first-order discounts

Once you set up online ordering, it’s time to give customers a good reason to place their first order online. And what’s better than an irresistible discount?

Using the Kickstarter module integrated into our online ordering system, you can invite existing dine-in customers to order online and create a first-buy promo that they won’t be able to resist. Learn how by watching this tutorial:

5. Join popular restaurant review sites

94% of US customers make a decision about where they’re going to eat based on online reviews. Naturally, that’s where your restaurant needs to be.

Create a listing or claim an existing one on popular review sites like Google Business Profile, TripAdvisor, and Yelp. Then, encourage every new customer to review your restaurant if they’ve enjoyed the food.

The more positive reviews you get, the more trust you’re going to build with potential customers, and the more excited they’ll be to try your food for themselves to see what all the hype is about.

6. Enable table reservations and food pre-orders

Another easy trick to encourage customers to pay your restaurant a visit is to give them the option to book a table. Some customers might be deterred by the lack of table reservations because they don’t want to arrive at the restaurant just to see that all the tables are full.

Elevate the table reservation experience by allowing customers to also pre-order and pay for their food when booking a table.

7. Create Instagrammable décor

Word spreads fast online, especially on social media. If your restaurant’s décor stands out, people will want to visit you just to snap a photo themselves. You only need a couple of people to post photos of your décor on social media for others to catch on.

You can start small with bold colors and cool wall art, or a funny neon sign. As you grow your business, keep in mind that big décor elements also make a big splash online.

It might be worth it to invest in something that will make your restaurant the talk of the town such as a vintage car decorated for the holidays or a nature corner with a bench and a flower arch featuring your restaurant logo.

These unique décor elements will bring people to your restaurant. And if they come for the photos, they’ll stay for the food too.

8. Collaborate with other local businesses

As the new restaurant on the block, other more established businesses can help you attract customers. Restaurants can collaborate with adjacent businesses such as hotels, wineries, or even local farms.

Restaurant partnerships are an excellent way to acquire new customers. You can do cross-promotion and recommend a local hotel or your craft brewery supplier to your customers, while they recommend your restaurant to theirs.

9. Keep your menu fresh and updated

When planning your restaurant menu, keep in mind customers love their all-time favorites but also enjoy novelty now and then.

So, while it would be crazy of you to remove a popular menu item that everyone loves, you should constantly evaluate your menu items and get rid of those that don’t perform well.

To provide customers with more variety, consider a menu of static dishes that you serve every day and a cycle menu that repeats over some time, such as daily specials.

If you’re going to be rotating your menu daily, not just any menu builder will do. You need one that allows you to easily add and update menu items in just a few clicks, like the one from GloriaFood:

10. Offer limited-time promotions

Another way to motivate customers to try your restaurant is to have limited-time offers that will convince them to take advantage of them before they expire.

Use language that promotes urgency such as “hurry up,” “today only,” “ends today,” or “get it before it runs out.” This will make the offer stand out and increase the chances of customers applying it to their cart.

Wrapping up

Restaurant customer acquisition is a must for any restaurateur. You need to invest time and resources into attracting customers to your eatery if you want to succeed in this competitive industry.

Get an optimized restaurant website, use free marketing platforms, and present customers with new products and services to convince them to choose your restaurant over the competition.