For the hospitality industry, 2020 will be remembered as a year that fundamentally changed the landscape of our business. While it saddens us that so many of our friends and families had to close their doors, we are excited to see the new bars and restaurants that take up the torch in the coming years as this pandemic comes to a close. Our guests will return, but they will be looking for those bars and restaurants that maintain high standards of cleanliness and sanitation. One of the easiest ways to achieve this is to remove those overlooked guest touchpoints that can easily spread germs and disease is to offer a touchless menu. Removing or reducing shared menus is an easy way to reduce guest touchpoints as well as save thousands of dollars in menu printing costs. Here are 5 ways offering a Touchless Menu to your guests will benefit you during the pandemic and beyond.
Safety, Cleanliness, and Sanitation
Shared menus come in all shapes and sizes. They can be hardcover booklets made from wood, metal, plastic, leather, fabric, etc., and not all of these materials can be easily cleaned and maintain their integrity. While the look of those shared menus may be a point of pride, maintaining the cleanliness can be costly or impossible. Additionally, you are spending labor on this maintenance.
With a touchless menu from TouchlessMenu.com, cleaning and sanitizing your touchless menu can be done right along with the table. Additionally, guests never need to touch the touchless menu. They can simply scan the QR code or hover their NFC capable phone near it to load the menu. And your menu will always look pristine on the phone’s screen. No more need to worry about someone spilling a drink or smudging the menu with a fingerprint.
A Touchless Menu will keep your guests, and your staff safe by reducing this commonly shared touchpoint.
Reduce or Eliminate Printing Costs
Whether you’re printing in house or outsourcing your menu printing, changing your menu can be a costly endeavor. Menus will ultimately get dirty and require replacement. A simple spelling error may require to re-print all of your menus if it is not caught before the printing. Wine lists require constant updating with vintage changes and the availability of your wines. For all of the reasons listed above and more, shared menus require a line item in the budget for printing.
With a touchless menu, you may never need to print a menu again. Touchless menus from TouchlessMenu.com can be updated instantly from the comfort of your office. You could even update your menu while you’re on a vacation paid for by the savings that come along with eliminating your printing budget. A touchless menu from TouchlessMenu.com costs only $10 per touchless menu. With a touchless menu, you only need to have one per table. Let’s compare that to a shared menu booklet of the same cost, $10. You will need one menu booklet per guest at a table. If you have a 4-top table, you are instantly saving $30 by offering a touchless menu and that does not include the cost of printing the pages to fill those shared menus. If you have a 20 table restaurant, you are saving $600 just in the menu booklets, plus 100% off on printing as you will never need to print a menu again. Offering a touchless menu will immediately improve the bottom line.
Change Your Menu
Imagine for a moment that a certain dish on your menu isn’t selling for whatever reason. Using shared menus, what are your options to remedy this. You could wait until the next menu change to remove that item, but then you are incurring inventory costs and possibly wasting product that isn’t moving. You could go ahead and reprint all of your menus, lowering the price of the dish or amending it, but then you will incur the printing costs. It’s too expensive either way.
If you offer a touchless menu, you have the freedom to change your menu as often as is necessary. Being able to change or amend your menu provides you with a new way to manage your inventory and respond to guest demands. Change prices, amend or remove dishes, even offer your features right on your menu helping it to sell. No printing costs, no labor costs, just simply change your menu.
When you update your touchless menu, all of the menus in your restaurant or immediately updated. You will no longer to task a server or hostess with changing out every menu or having to worry about staff passing out an outdated menu. If you sell the last vintage of a bottle of wine, you can simply change your wine list during the shift. The next guest to scan your Touchless Menu will be viewing an up-to-the-minute accurate version of your wine list. Change your menu as often as you would like without spending the money or labor required to change a shared menu.
A New Marketing Tool
Traditionally, with shared menus, you could market an upcoming event by placing a leaflet inside your menu with the information. You could also put that leaflet in a check presenter for your guests to view before they leave. Materials on the tables such as table tents are also an option. All of the options above require printing costs as well as sanitation procedures.
Using a touchless menu provides you with a new way to capture your guest's attention about upcoming events or promotions without the additional cost or labor. You can offer the information right on their mobile screen, and they can take it home with them if they choose. You could even offer a link to your website to display the information, have them book a reservation for the event, or even sign up for a mailing list for future events and promotions. All of these options can be added and removed or changed from your computer, instantly. With a touchless menu, you have a new tool in your marketing arsenal.
Social Media Benefits
For those with a website - a touchless menu from TouchlessMenu.com will increase the traffic to your website potentially helping with your site’s SEO ranking on search engines. You can place social share buttons on your menu for guests to instantly let their friends know about your amazing offerings. Ask your guests to rate their amazing experience on trip advisor, yelp, or whichever site you deem to help drive business to your door.
For those without a website - a touchless menu from TouchlessMenu.com can do wonders for helping you to demonstrate to your guests what you have to offer. You can take advantage of the Touchless Menu Premium service for only $10 per month and upload your menu to Touchless Menu. With that service, you are provided with a link to your uploaded menu. This link can be used on your social media sites to show your most recent menu without having to go to all of the sites individually to update it. You don’t need to have a website to offer a touchless menu from TouchlessMenu.com.