Bakery Sales Strategy: How to Make Your Business Profitable

An effective bakery sales strategy includes irresistible menu offerings, useful technology, well-thought marketing and great customer service. To make your bakery profitable, you must focus on client experience with the goal of gaining more loyal customers.

In this article, we’ll describe all the steps of a successful bakery sales strategy, so you can easily use this information to achieve the revenue you are hoping for.

How do you attract customers to your bakery? How to make a bakery profitable? Read on to find the answer to these important questions and much more:

Are you up for a challenge? Take a few minutes and research how many bakeries are in your immediate area and in your city. What menu items are they offering, how are they promoting their business and what do their reviews say?

Once you have this list of competitors, you will realize you need to do something different and special to persuade potential customers to choose your bakery instead of theirs.

To do so, you will need to make branding a priority in your bakery sales strategy. Here is what you should focus on:

• Creating a persona for your business, complete with tone of voice that must be the same on every platform you use (website, social media, review websites);
• An attractive logo that will be immediately recognizable on your store-front, packaging, and online messaging;
• Offering merchandise (totes, aprons, mugs) personalized with your logo and colors. You can go a step further and collaborate with a local artist for a unique design;
• Having signature items on your menu: you must create some bakery items that are unique to your brand and will tempt people to visit you to experience the special blend of flavors and textures.

Another important step of your bakery sales strategy is getting customers to keep coming back. While loyal clients may love your signature items, they will inevitably feel the need to try something new. Don’t let them go to your competitors! Make your relationship stronger with these ideas:

• Add seasonal flavors to your menu: freshen up your bakery offerings by including seasonal produce in your offerings. For example, during the beginnig of summer, you can have cherry tarts, raspberry scones, or blueberry jam brioche;
• Try out viral trends: the foodie world is always overwhelmed by new trends, some of the most recent being Dubai chocolate or cookie croissants (crookies). Attract more customers by putting your own spin on the trend and creating a novelty menu item;
• Create limited time offers: just like any other food business, you will have slow days and busy days. While on some days, you will sell everything you cooked, on others you will be left with menu items that won’t keep until the next day. Sell those faster by offering customers an end-of-day discount. It’s a win-win.

The secret to each successful bakery sales strategy is to make the customers happy. Clients that enjoy their experience at your bakery are more likely to return and recommend your business to others.

If you want to provide customers with fast service that encourages loyalty, you need to take advantage of the GloriaFood bakery POS system. Not only is it easy to set up and makes your employees’ work easier, but it also improves the customer experience with these useful features:

• Ability to accept multiple payment methods: you can serve every customer by accepting payment by cash, credit or debit card, smartphone, and smartwatch;

• Color-coded dashboard: customized for your bakery, so employees can easily identify each item and serve customers faster;

• Fast POS login: team members can login instantly with an RFID card, so they can start serving clients as fast as possible;

• Offline mode: even if you have problems with the internet, you will still be able to serve customers as normal;

• Access to valuable bakery analytics: so you can use data like best and worst-selling menu items to optimize your menu to cater more to your customers’ needs and increase sales.

Don’t miss out on technology that could significantly increase your revenue. Check out the GloriaFood POS affordable pricing and start your journey to success now!

If you want to further speed of service, especially during rush hours, you can enable clients to order and pay on-premises by simply scanning a QR code. You can generate a free one with GloriaFood, print it and display it in a visible spot in your bakery.

Your employees are the ones who will be preparing the bakery products and directly interacting with customers, so you should also include them in your bakery sales strategy. Precisely, you should make it a priority to give them all the tools necessary to excel at their jobs through training.

Here are the main topics you should cover:

• Food safety: ensuring everyone follows hygiene rules to provide clients with a safe and enjoyable experience;
• Upselling and cross selling: how to make suggestions to customers and persuade them to buy more without being intrusive;
• How to use the POS system: for employees to be efficient, they must master all features of the POS system.

The good news is that GloriaFood can help you with the last part as the POS system includes a training mode. This allows you to show newbies the ropes without affecting your financial statements.

Once employees learn, you can just remove the training mode tag to allow them the necessary access to perform their job.

No matter how big or small your bakery, if you only sell your menu items in location, you are limiting your profit. If you want to increase your revenue, you should include additional sales channels in your bakery sales strategy, such as:

• Catering: for a variety of events, from corporate parties, friends gathering and even dessert bars for weddings;
• Online ordering: while catering is limited to the existence of events, by selling your food online, you can have a constant stream of new orders. Potential customers that may not be able to reach your location will still get to enjoy your delicious bakery items.

We have the solution! Use the free GloriaFood online ordering system to start accepting orders directly on your website or social media. The set-up process is so simple and fast, you will be able to do it all in less than 10 minutes:

Moreover, the online ordering and the POS system from GloriaFood work perfectly together. You will be able to accept both online and in-store orders in the same place, making work easier for your employees.

You can choose whether you want online orders to get automatically accepted by the POS and sent to the kitchen or accepted manually by you via the order-taking app.

One of the best bakery marketing ideas is to get involved with your local community. This will help you create stronger bonds with your customers, become a recognizable brand, and expand your audience.

Here are a few partnerships ideas you can seek out:

• Local complementary food and drink businesses: some restaurants, bars, and coffee shops don’t have an in-house baker to create bakery and pastry products for their clients. You can be the go-to bakery for them, allowing you to sell more of your products;
• Hotels and accommodations: you can strike a partnership where hotels either serve your products on their premises or they give clients a voucher to use at your bakery for breakfast;
• Grocery stores: you can have your bakery products featured in the local and artisan grocery stores to increase your sales.

To create an effective bakery sales strategy, you must first know where your business stands. How much are you earning weekly? What products sell best? How much do you sell online vs on-premises? Once you know this data, you can identify areas for improvement.

If you use the GloriaFood POS system, you can easily get access to a variety of useful in-store analytics, such as:

• Property financial report: net sales, offered discounts, order types, cash payments, and more;
• Employee financial report: info on opened checks, ordered menu items, service chargers, applied discounts, returns;
• Open check report: review all opened checks that must be closed before resetting the financial report;
• Check journal report: to identify any fraudulent activity;
• Family group & menu item sales report: have a look over your best-selling and worst-selling menu items and categories.

Furthermore, if you also use the GloriaFood online ordering system, you will be able to monitor online analytics too:

• Number of new and returning clients;
• The most efficient promotions;
• Delivery heatmaps to see your most profitable delivery areas;
• Online ranking to improve visibility;
• Website funnel to identify where clients are stopping in the ordering process.

Any successful bakery sales strategy will also include a thorough marketing plan full of bakery advertising ideas that help you attract customers, retain them, and convince them to spend more. Try these ones:

• Ace social media marketing for bakery: focus on getting professional photographs of your products so you can make followers instantly crave your menu. Moreover, try to initiate conversations with questions in captions and stories;
• Try paid ads: select your target audience and tempt them with offers and a direct link to your menu. You can use GloriaFood to generate the direct link to your online menu where customers will be able to place an order in just a few clicks;
• Implement bakery giveaway ideas: you can go for simple share and like contests or have people post a picture from your bakery to win a goodies basket;
• Get a SEO-optimized website: this is a great marketing tool because it will increase visibility online. It will also serve as the perfect place for customers to place online orders. You can use the GloriaFood restaurant website builder to generate your bakery website in less than 10 minutes;

• Add promotions to your menu: increase average order value with bakery promotion ideas such as 10% off the cart for orders over $50 or 2+1 free on simple croissants. You can set up a variety of promotions in seconds with the Promotions module from GloriaFood;

• Start email marketing campaigns: get people to return with the Autopilot module from GloriaFood. The email marketing module automatically divides customers according to purchasing history and sends them personalized offers to encourage repeat business, prevent cart abandonment, and reengage clients.

While your products are your main selling point, sometimes clients need a little push to visit your location. Therefore, if you want to attract more customers, try to incorporate events into your bakery sales strategy. Here are couple of more unconventional ideas:

• Day party: invite local artists and DJs to play some music and entertain customers while they dance and enjoy a good pastry;
• Pet meeting party: make your bakery pet-friendly for a day and provide customers with treats for their four-legged friends;
• Guess-the-ingredients day: organize a new menu item launch where you offer free samples of the new addition and have customers guess the ingredients.

After you harness the power of data from your in-house technology, how about gathering data from your customers? Most of the time, you only have to listen and monitor your profiles online because clients will leave reviews and tell you what they like and what they don’t.

Make it a habit to look over your online reviews (and reply to them) to identify potential areas for improvement. For example, if many clients complain that they can’t reach you during your opening hours, consider changing the schedule.

Don’t wait around for your business to be discovered! Follow the tips provided in this article to create a foolproof bakery sales strategy that will not only attract customers and get them to return, but it will also turn you into a staple of the community.