Baked goods have a prominent place in our daily lives, in one way or another. Whether it’s bread for our morning toast, cupcakes, or muffins to go with our afternoon cup of coffee or tea, or something fancier for a special occasion, baked goods are there to make our lives better and more delicious. With the holiday season upon us, you have the perfect opportunity to promote your bakery and its menu.
There are multiple strategies you can use to do so. From using a festive menu design to sending out emails to your customer list, you can craft an effective marketing plan to promote your new holiday menu.
Email Marketing
One of the most effective ways to reach out to your clientele on the internet is via email marketing. You can directly target your past and present customers and get your message across effectively. To market your bakery’s new holiday menu via email, you will need a list of addresses to send these emails to. You can do so easily from people who order items online by asking them to share their emails on your store’s website. You may also ask customers to share their email accounts when they visit your physical store as well and add it to the list.
You will need a designing tool to make the email that you will send, such as PosterMyWall. It is online and provides users with professionally made Christmas email templates that they can edit and use as their email content. Using a template saves you time and effort and gives you a basic structure that you can modify according to your needs.
In the example below, the designer chose shades of green and red in the email design to fit the Christmas theme. They also offered 15% off the holiday menu to further incentivize the customers to purchase the special items. Furthermore, they added artistic and enticing photographs of the bakery items so people can visualize what they are ordering and also be tempted to order other items as well. Something similar can work for your bakery as well.
Offer Deals
The holidays are a time of giving and spreading cheer and what better way for you to do so than by offering special holiday deals at your bakery. A simple discount can do wonders, but you can go one step further and bundle a bunch of items together in a package deal. Adding a certain quantity of cookies with the purchase of a cake or even a simple “buy one, get one free” offer can do well here.
This gives your customers the message that you care about them and their bank account. The goal is to offer better value to customers. Your new holiday menu, with its offers and deals, must create that perception for it to be successful.
Festive Decorations
Your costumes will be more likely to buy from your holiday menu if you can help set the mood. As such, consider putting up some themed decorations at your bakery to help your customers get in the festive mood. A small Christmas tree, a wreath, or even banners with Christmas greetings can do wonders.
Put up fairy lights in your window displays as well. Presentation plates, dishes, bowls, and mugs can also enhance your displays too and distinguish regular items from Christmas-themed menu items. You can get these decorations easily from your nearest dollar or discount store and won’t cost you much. Moreover, you can use these decorations next year as well.
Put Up Digital Signage
Digital Signage will allow you to display multiple messages on a single screen without the need of putting up multiple signs. It features a digital screen that you can program to display various messages and put them up in your store. This will save you space and money in the long run and you won’t have to physically change signs after a while.
To promote your new holiday menu, you will program your digital signage to display your entire menu, any offers you may have for it, and some artistic photos of some of the foods being offered. Ideally, you want these screens up near the main food display and counter, and close to the entrance. Not only will this promote your menu, but it can aid your customers to make their choice as to what to buy.
Festive Menus
Sometimes the very thing you wish to promote can become its own marketing tool. For your Christmas menu, this can be done by designing holiday-themed menus which put the viewer in a festive mood. From Christmas trees to stars to other decorations, there are many designing elements you can use and put on your holiday menus.
To create these menus, you will need the help of an online graphics designer, such as PosterMyWall. You can take advantage of the hundreds of menu templates that will give you a basic structure that you can tweak and fill in with your information. This will save time and effort and you can create multiple menu styles in half the time required to make one menu conventionally.
The Melanated Cakes bakery created a simple and minimalistic Christmas-themed menu which they shared on Instagram. They used a white textured background and added a Christmas and some stars along with their menu items and prices. You can go for a similar minimalistic approach, or try for something bolder.
Marketing and promotion oftentimes involve simple strategies that, when executed correctly and consistently, yield the most results. The advice listed above may seem as such but it may yield results if you keep following it. However, you must allow room to change and alter your approach based on the feedback you receive from your customer base. Maybe they react better to a certain strategy than others. You must then double down on that particular strategy in order to yield even better results.
