Monetizing Your Restaurant’s Reservation Requests

If you take reservations, what are you sending people after they submit a reservation request?

If the answer to that question is nothing, you need to set up a system to send automated reservation reminders – but that’s another conversation.

If you’re already sending reservation reminders but that’s all, you’re missing out on an easy opportunity to up sell menu items like appetizers, drinks, and desserts automatically.

The premise is simple:

The day before someone’s reservation, shoot that person an email with a nice photo of something you want them to buy during their visit that they might not normally have purchased.

Want to sell more cocktails? Send them a photo of a sweaty mojito.

Wish more people ordered an appetizer? Send them a photo of your bruschetta that’s glistening with olive oil. You get the idea…

Here’s an example video of how we do this:

All that’s required is:

1. A Reservation Request form with a date picker from a form provider that has pre-built Zaps (we recommend using Gravity Forms or Jotform)
2. An email automation application that allows you to trigger based on dates (we recommend ActiveCampaign)
3. An enticing image of the product you want to upsell

That’s it!

With those three things, you can create an automated email that goes out the day before your reservations and gets people drooling over whatever it is you want to up-sell them.

Field Tested

“Letting people know about our 2×1 Mojito Promotion the day before their reservation is a no-brainer that we just never thought to do. One of the benefits of working with Cooking With Social is they’re always coming up with awesome little ideas like this that generate more and more sales for our restaurant.”

Joe Jack – Joe Jack’s Fish Shack

Want us to set up an automated pre-reservation up-sell email system? Let us know via the form below!