Takeout Menus That Return Huge Profits

Pizza, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, American - no matter what the cuisine, if you run a takeout business you know how important menus are to your success. The right takeout menu can grow your business dramatically, especially if you employ the following strategies for creating takeout menus that return huge profits.

Think customer

Like any other business, you have to know your customer. What are your best-selling items? What items do you think your customer would love if they knew about them? More importantly, what motivates your customer to order from you? If you can identify not only customer demographics, but also customer motivations, you can tailor your menu designs to elicit the same emotions that fuel those motivations. For example, let's say you own a pizza delivery restaurant and you notice that you get a good volume of orders from a particular neighborhood on Sundays at 1 p.m. With a little investigation (asking questions) you might find out that 100 of those orders are coming from families whose children are in soccer and that games end at 12:30 p.m. on Sundays. By the time the hungry families get home, everyone wants to relax before Monday and they decide to order out. And maybe you find out that there about 500 other soccer families you should be marketing to ... see where this is going? You could design a takeout menu specifically around this demographic, scenario and motivation.

Upsell, upsell, upsell

Your takeout menus should not be a simple list of menu items. You should include plenty of upsell opportunities such as "Add fries and a drink for $1.99" and coupons for discounts off of future orders. Showcase your menu items with highlighted boxes, plenty of white space, oversized imagery, icons and text such as "House Specialty," "Customer Favorite" or "Biggest Tenderloin in California." Provide "build your own" opportunities with tacos, salads, pizzas, pastas and other dishes. The more opportunities to sell, the more opportunities to profit, but that doesn't mean you should wander from your niche. Your customers order from you because they already like what you sell.

A professional appearance

Sloppy menus come from sloppy restaurants - everyone knows (or at least thinks) that. For best results, go with professionally printed restaurant menus from an online menu printing company that prints full-color menus on 100-pound gloss text or 70-pound matte text stock for the best look. If your menu is clean and compelling, your takeout business will get orders instead of competitors' menus that are dingy and uninspiring. Takeout menus that are professional, geared to upsell and speak directly to your customers have the best chance of success. Don't miss this critical step to takeout restaurant success.