Welcome to your handbook for the holidays.
As the leaves turn brilliant shades of orange and gold, and a slight chill enters the air, you know it’s that special time of year again. Diners are eagerly seeking October frights, November bites, and December delights… and your restaurant can be their go-to destination for it all.
This holiday season isn’t just about spreading joy—it’s a golden opportunity for your restaurant to earn more revenue. Guests are excited to embrace the festivities, and they’re on the lookout for memorable experiences and enticing discounts to make celebrations even more special.
In this guide, we offer a season-spanning feast of tips, technology tools, and inspiring success stories that will equip your restaurant for the months ahead (and beyond). From growing your sales to helping staff manage the holiday rush, this guide has everything you need to be merry.
First things first: Diners want holiday experiences.
While you may already offer some elements of the holiday wishlist to the right, the key to holiday success lies in how you position these offerings as unique “holiday experiences.”
For example, rather than just providing offers to guests, framing the offer as an “exclusive Cyber Monday deal” or “a gift to our loyal customers” taps into the emotional connection consumers have to the festive season and can serve as that extra push to get them to place an order with your restaurant.
What makes guests more likely to visit a restaurant during the holidays?
70%
31%
28%
27%
24%
Special offers
Holiday events
Live entertainment
Holiday-themed meals
Game day events
No tricks—just treats!
While finding the best way to engage with guests over the holiday season can feel overwhelming, there are plenty of restaurants who have already carved out success using a wide variety of events, special menu items, and game day promotions. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel here, take a look at our list of treats that have proven to help restaurants earn additional revenue while providing guests a memorable experience.
Pop Tip: Once you’ve identified the opportunities you want to capitalize on for the holiday season, create a promotional calendar to make it easier to schedule marketing communications and keep your staff organized.
Sporting Event Watch Parties:
Making your restaurant the destination for guests to root for their favorite teams is a great way to earn repeat business. The best part? It can be as simple as making sure you have the right cable channels and turning on your TVs.
Brixx & Barley takes their game-day celebrations a step further by hosting tailgate parties at Metlife Stadium and letting guests pre-order tickets through their online ordering.
Prix Fixe Dinners:
Exclusive dining events can help your restaurant earn some extra revenue—plus it creates an exciting opportunity for your kitchen staff to flex their creative culinary skills!
Henderson & Kane hosts a four-course dinner that pays homage to Dia de los Muertos. Their chefs create a menu featuring authentic flavors with a modern twist. Guests can purchase tickets through their online ordering.
Live Music and Entertainment:
A rotating calendar of local talent is a sure-fire way to entice guests to visit for the holidays. Don’t feel limited to just music though, you can also feature comedians, movie nights, karaoke, and trivia!
Thai One On regularly features local musicians for guests to enjoy. In some cases, they even sell tickets to earn revenue from these events.
Festive Decorations:
A little decoration can go a long way to dazzle guests for upcoming events and celebrations.
The Union Kitchen hosts a Taylor Swift brunch with trivia, a charity raffle, and music from all of the Eras soundtrack. To really sell the experience, they decorate their restaurant with balloons, sparkles, butterflies, and more!
Holiday-Themed Menus:
Special menus or menu items are a great way to attract diners seeking seasonal delights. It can be as simple as a clever rename of a fan favorite dish or as complex as crafting a menu with classic holiday offerings.
Poogan’s Porch features Thanksgiving classics like herb-roasted turkey, sage, sausage & cornbread dressing, whipped potatoes and more to satisfy guests’ holiday cravings.
Holiday Events:
Whether it’s a grand party or an online ordering event, making your food the centerpiece of guests’ holiday celebrations is a great way to ensure your restaurant is a part of their holiday traditions.
Flora Mexican Kitchen is hosting their annual Halloween party with a 5-course meal, open bar, and live music to ensure guests have a spooktacular time!
Offers and Discounts:
Providing a special discount to incentivize guests to sign up for your email list or to earn a revisit from a loyal customer is a win-win! Your guests enjoy holiday savings and you earn repeat visits from your biggest fans.
Hummus & Pita co. invites guests to place an online order with an enticing 15% discount on their first order. To maximize visibility and drive more orders, they have a message about the offer pop up on the homepage of their website.
Gift Cards:
Selling physical and digital gift cards provides diners a thoughtful and convenient way to share the joy of dining at your restaurant, and can be a reliable revenue boost during the festive season.
For Small Business Saturday, Lucy’s Pizzeria encourages diners to stock up on cards for the holiday season by offering a free $5 for every $25 spent on gift cards.
Marketing and promotion.
Much like assembling a delectable Thanksgiving feast, a successful holiday season requires a spread of carefully crafted offerings to entice your guests. It’s not enough to simply host exciting holiday events and promotions, you have to actually invite guests over! Fortunately, you have a cornucopia of online tools at your disposal to spread the word and generate excitement for all your holiday activity.
Get the most from your website.
Use pop-up announcement...
Feature high-margin items...
Showcase an events calendar...
Provide seasonal menus...
Invite guests to join your contact list...
Pop Tip! Use your website to bring in new guests.
Boosting your restaurant’s holiday success means attracting fresh faces to your website. Craft distinct pages for each menu item to expand your digital presence. This helps search engines like Google serve up your offerings to potential hungry customers.
Shameless plug: Popmenu does this and more to improve your website’s performance and bring in new customers.
Last year, Phat Eatery hosted a Thanksgiving online ordering event, featuring seasonal dishes like beef rendang wellington, honey-glazed turkey breast, and ginger sake cranberry sauce. Yum!
These tasty offerings earned the restaurant $16.5k in online ordering revenue from one event, with guests spending an average of $210/order.
That’s a 190% increase in ticket size over Phat Eatery’s average online order.
Offers
Diners are hungry for discounts and special offers this holiday season.
While a discount initially means smaller order value, it can go a long way to entice new and repeat guests. Plus, encouraging guests to sign up for your email list to join a loyalty program can improve customer retention and grow revenue in the long term.
Just check out some stats from restaurants who are already using offers.
Provided guests a $6 discount
Earned $17,000
Guests who redeemed an offer are 3x more likely to place multiple online orders
Provided guests a 15% discount
Earned $24,500
Guests who redeemed an offer are 2.7x more likely to place multiple online orders
Provided guests a 30% discount
Earned $260,000
Guests who redeemed an offer are 1.4x more likely to place multiple online orders
Email marketing
Email marketing remains one of the top ways to connect with and market to your guests.
In fact, 60% of consumers said they want to hear from their favorite restaurant at least once a week.
A holiday calendar featuring promotional offers and exciting events will make stuffing your emails with valuable content easy.
Email marketing success with Henri’s Bakery & Deli.
In the 2023 holiday season, Henri's leveraged email marketing to promote their festive pastries and baked goods for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. These emails earned the bakery $30,800, nearly double what they earned them in 2022.
Pop Tip! Get tools that work together to see how your website brings in new guests.
Having a single tool to manage your website, marketing, ordering (and more…) is the secret ingredient to seeing real results from your holiday efforts. It unlocks valuable insights about your guests and provides a clearer picture of what marketing activities are leading to orders and which should be left on the chopping block.
Another shameless plug: Popmenu has first-party online ordering, website management, and a robust marketing suite all included, so you can easily see how your digital tools work together to earn you online orders all season long.
Another way to “Pumpkin Spice” up your marketing efforts is through social media marketing. In fact, 73% of consumers said they are more likely to visit a restaurant if they see a promotion on social channels.
Using social platforms to showcase decorations, seasonal dishes, and operational updates for the holidays can inspire guests to visit your restaurant—and makes it easy to invite their friends!
Plan your content with Artificial Intelligence.
As the use of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to grow across industries, so do automation capabilities. In fact, AI can actually help you build and plan marketing content—saving time and helping to hit revenue goals without increasing manual efforts.
Product peek: Popmenu’s new AI Marketing product automatically plans your content calendar, suggesting and creating unique emails, texts, and social media posts based on guest behavior, new reviews, upcoming events, new menu items, etc.—all that’s left to do is edit (if you want) and approve.
‘Tis the season…
The holidays are the season of bustling tables and hungry diners. As guests cozy up in your restaurant to celebrate the joys of the season, it can be difficult to orchestrate the perfect dining experience while your restaurant is so busy.
That’s where on-premise solutions come to the rescue, helping restaurants conquer the chaos and make the holiday season a time of merriment for both customers and staff alike.
Holiday phones are ringing…
Hand-in-hand with the special menus and events you’ve planned for the holiday season come questions from guests, and lots of them. Tech-savvy restaurants are leaning more on automated answering services to handle the influx of inquisitive guests to allow staff to focus on in-person diners.
Product peek: Popmenu’s AI Answering automatically answers questions using information from your website, and texts diners a link to make a reservation or place an online order to ensure guests who call receive the best possible service without pulling your staff from in-person guests.
Turn phone calls into marketing opportunities.
“Hello, thank you for calling The Black Cat Bar & Grill. Join us this weekend for a holiday party and enjoy spiked cocoa and honey-baked ham. How may I help you today?”
With custom greetings and responses, you can highlight upcoming events, special offers, new dishes, and send links to revenue-driving actions like reservations, online ordering, and waitlisting.
A little automation goes a long way.
The power of automated phone answering.
In 4 months with AI Answering, Local’s Pizza & Grill automatically fielded 4,900 calls, saving their staff over 42 hours on the phone.
With the help of the tool, Local’s increased their monthly online ordering revenue by 162% from 2022 to 2023.
Guests’ holiday wishlist
$6,113
$16,043
Before Answering
After Answering
Put the pen and paper on your naughty (wait)list.
Give guests (and yourself) the gift of a better waitlisting experience. A good digital waitlist will capture guest data, encourage guest engagement and upsells, increase table turnover, and drive more reviews to the menu.
"Our guests really enjoy the digital waitlist—it definitely helps keep them engaged while they’re waiting for a table…guests are texted a link to the menu while they wait so they can browse beforehand and then they’re texted again after they’re seated, encouraging them to leave a review. We’ve seen a major increase in reviews from that."
Alisha Binkoski
Marketing Director, Kelly Companies
Marketing Director, Kelly Companies
Final thoughts
We’ve covered a lot in this guide, but just remember these three points to help you run a memorable and profitable holiday season at your restaurant:
Be intentional with your holiday planning to get the most out of guests during the season.
Use marketing to collect guest contact data and maximize your potential earnings.
Technology can automate and streamline on-premise operations to ensure a delightful experience for all.
And, if you ever need an extra hand, Popmenu’s team of restaurant marketers is ready to help you build your strategy, create content and execute across channels. Learn more about our Boost team at
popmenu.com/boostAbout Popmenu
As a leading innovator in restaurant technology, Popmenu is on a mission to make profitable growth easy for all restaurants. Digital marketing, online ordering, and on-premise technologies headline a powerful product suite infused with artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and deep data on guest preferences. The company consolidates tools needed to engage guests, serving as a digital control center for more than 10,000 independent restaurants and hospitality groups in the US, UK, and Canada.
For more information about Popmenu, visit popmenu.com
