10 Holiday Promotions for Restaurants to Boost Spirit and Sales

Holiday promotions for restaurants include special limited-edition menus and drinks, happy hour discounts, offers for large orders, free delivery, catering deals for holiday events, and combo offers at a special price.

In this article, you will find a variety of promo ideas to delight guests at your restaurant. On top of this, we will show you how to easily add them to your menu in seconds and how to monitor their progress to maximize holiday sales.

These promotions have multiple goals: to attract new customers, to increase the average order value, and to offer good value for money so clients will leave positive reviews and recommend your restaurant.

If you are looking for holiday promotions for restaurants that will attract attention to your business, consider updating your menu. While people may love your usual dishes, they will be expecting some special offerings for the holidays. Why not give them what they want?

Here are a couple of ways to make your menu special for the holidays:

• Create a prix-fixe menu: similar to a combo meal, a prix-fixe menu for casual restaurants usually contains one to two mains, one to two sides, drinks, and two desserts. You can incorporate high-profit menu items to ensure you are making a profit with each sale;
• Add limited-edition menu items for each holiday: bring the festive spirit by offering traditional dishes customers won’t be able to resist, such as Turkey and mash for Thanksgiving and Yule Roll for Christmas;

Updating your menu constantly can be a hassle if you are relying on paper ones. But, if you use the online menu creator from GloriaFood, you will be able to edit your menu as many times as you want, for free. The process is also extremely simple and intuitive. Check out this video to find out more:

Moreover, you can also add allergen and nutritional information to each dish to also attract people who suffer from allergies or follow a specific diet. You can offer them a safe way to dine while increasing your profit.

Here’s how you can label your menu with allergens and nutritional information:

The best holiday promotions for restaurants focus on persuading people to spend more at your restaurant. A tried and tested promo that achieves this goal is discounts for large orders. For example, 10% off for orders over $150 or 5% off for orders over $70.

This type of offer will usually attract big groups that will make it their mission to add more items to their order to take advantage of the promotion.

Drinks are one of the high-profit menu items at your restaurant because they cost little to prepare yet can be sold at a high price. Drinks can also be a great incentive for clients to visit your restaurant during the holidays, especially if you create special limited-edition beverages.

Here are a couple of drink ideas for the holidays:

• Spiced Orange Spritzer
• Winter Aperol Spritz
• Peppermint Patty Espresso Martini
• Spiced clementine mulled whisky
• Hot Cider Eggnog

Don’t forget to also focus on mocktails as they are one of the biggest restaurant trends right now. Try out these options:

• Iced Eggnog Latte
• Irish cream hot chocolate
• Sparkling Berry and Pomegranate Mocktail
• Peppermint Orange Syrup Soda
• Grapefruit Basil Kombucha Mocktail

It is time to turn your slow hours into busy hours with happy hour promotions. Here are a couple of ideas:

• 10% of all desserts during happy hour;
• Holiday combo meals only available during happy hour;
• 5% of all drinks during happy hour.

Do you know how to create some of the most irresistible holiday promotions for restaurants? Appeal to your customers’ sweet tooth! Resisting your delicious desserts is hard, but you can make it impossible by selling them at a discount.

For example, you can have a promo of:

• 5% off all desserts;
• 10% off all chocolate desserts;
• 10% off all cookies.

Holiday promotions for restaurants don’t have to be available just during the specific day. You can create offers that expand beyond. Do you often have leftover holiday dishes and don’t want them to go to waste?

You can create a buy one, get one free promotion to tempt people to order. For example, buy one Turkey pie, get another for free. Even if Thanksgiving is over, people will still want to eat traditional food, especially if they get a good deal for it.

Are you focusing all your efforts on in-location sales? Then you might have noticed that you can only serve a limited number of customers, no matter how fast you turn tables. To increase sales during holidays and beyond, you need to start selling your food online.

To keep your profit, you need the free online ordering system from GloriaFood. You can add it on your website in less than 10 minutes and allow customers to place orders easily, in just a few clicks.

To launch the new service, you can create a promotion for free delivery during the holidays. You should also condition the free delivery with a minimum order value, such as $60 to ensure you won’t be losing money while running this promo.

If you want to stand out from your competitors, you must look for out-of-the-box holiday promotions for restaurants. Combo deals are a great option to add to your menu, but what if you went a step further and created combo offers with local businesses?

This will enable you to create a more entertaining experience, reach a new audience, and strengthen your bonds with the community. Here are a couple of ideas:

• Dinner and a movie: a deal that includes both a meal at your restaurant and a viewing at the local theater;
• Shop and dine: a meal and a voucher for shopping at a local business.

Have you considered expanding into catering? There is a lot of money to be made, especially around the holidays, when people are organizing a lot of parties, but have little time to cook.

You can promote your new service on social media and offer a small discount for people who book your catering during the holidays. You can target:

• Office parties;
• Friend gatherings;
• Big family gatherings.

Holiday promotions for restaurants must expand beyond what you can offer in your physical location if you want to increase your sales. Meal kits can be a great new revenue stream targeted to people who enjoy cooking and spending time with loved ones, but don’t want to make it complicated.

Appeal to previous customers that love your food with ready-to-order kits at a special price. Here are a couple of ideas:

• Thanksgiving dinner for eight: pre-roasted turkey with sides and desserts that need minimal preparation;
• Gingerbread house kit;
• Christmas dinner for four: to attract families who want a home-cooked meal that tastes just as good as at your restaurant.

The holidays can be trying times for restaurants as owners have to face multiple challenges like securing ingredients, managing rush hours, and scheduling stuff. But the good news is that adding promotions to the menu will not add to the stress.

With the promotions module from GloriaFood, you can add offers to your online menu in just a couple of seconds with a few clicks. Once set up, the promos will immediately appear at the top of the menu to be immediately noticed.

Do you also want to make the holiday promotions for restaurants available for in-location clients? Then you need to enable on-premises dining via QR code. Thanks to GloriaFood, this is also a very simple process that costs nothing.

You can generate a QR code for free, print it out, and stick it on the tables. Clients will scan the code and see the promotions as soon as they open the menu. Moreover, they will also be able to place the orders and pay by simply using their phone.

Do you want to make your work even easier by auto-accepting both in-location and online orders through your POS? We have the solution: the best restaurant POS system from GloriaFood.

You can set both online orders and on premise orders placed via QR code to be auto accepted and sent through the POS directly to the kitchen for preparation.

Here is how the GloriaFood POS system can make your work easier during the holidays and the experience more pleasant for your clients:

• Increased speed-of-service: serve customers as fast as possible during rush hours due to a color-coded dashboard that makes identifying menu categories a breeze;

• Fast log-in for employees: no need for complicated passwords that can be forgotten during busy hours, staff can log-in immediately by scanning their RFID card;

• Ability to accept multiple payment methods: increase client satisfaction by allowing customers to pay however they want, be it cash, card or debit card, or smartphone;

• Work seamlessly offline: if the cold weather affects the internet, you can keep opening checks in-house and accepting and payments as normal, with no interruption;

• Ability to connect to multiple printers: if you want to make your operations more efficient, you can have a dedicated printer for each kitchen station. This will improve front and back of house communication

Some holiday promotions for restaurants require an investment on your part in the hopes of significantly increasing your sales. But how can you know if any of the offers that you added to your menu were popular with your clients and achieved their desired goal?

By monitoring them, of course. You can do so easily by using the Reports module embedded in the online ordering system from GloriaFood.

On top of promotion statistics, you will also get access to other useful data like website health and ranking, and delivery heatmaps to identify the areas where most of your orders come from.

Adding restaurant promotions to your menu and offering clients a variety of unique deals and experiences during the holidays has multiple benefits:

• Attract new clients: irresistible offers will convince potential customers to give your place a try, especially if they find a good deal during the holidays;
• Increase revenue: with a bigger number of clients, you sell more of your food, and you increase your overall profit;
• Boost brand visibility: promotions are a great marketing tool that will help you strengthen your online presence;
• Drive repeat business: you can cater promotions to repeat customers to persuade them to make another purchase;
• Stand out from competitors: when you implement holiday promotions for restaurant and your competitors don’t, customers are more likely to choose your business.

Use the above holiday promotions for restaurants to stand out from your competitors, attract more clients, grow your reputation, increase the average order value, and boost your sales.

Now that you know how easy it is to add offers to your menu, it is time to put it into practice and experience the benefits!