BOGO: The Strategy to Boost Sales for your Small Business

Many establishments suffer from a lack of business, with low sales and poor profits being the order of the day. However, there are different marketing and sales strategies that companies can engage in to help boost their sales turnover and margins. The Buy One and Get One free, or BOGO for short, is a tried and tested marketing and sales strategy with a pretty high rate of success in most retail businesses, including restaurants.

 It is interesting to note that a BOGO strategy is not restricted by the nature, size, location, and age of your restaurant business. Any eat-in, takeaway, drive-in, or online order restaurant can apply a buy one get one free promotion strategy to achieve great results. 

Your primary motivation for adopting a BOGO strategy in the overall marketing and sales plan to increase your sales is two-fold for your restaurant business. 
On the one hand, your buy one get one free marketing strategy is designed to attract new paying customers to your restaurant. On the other hand, it is meant to retain the loyalty and patronage of existing customers. 

The former will be the principal reason if you own a newly opened eatery or restaurant, but for older, more experienced restaurant owners, both reasons would suffice. In this article, we explain in more detail what BOGO is all about with useful buy one get one free examples.

What Does BOGO Mean?

As stated above, BOGO is an acronym for 'Buy One and Get One free.' BOGO is one of many types of promos that businesses adopt in their marketing and sales plans. This promo is particularly useful to retail establishments and owners of restaurant businesses. 

BOGO is a strategy you might want to explore if you offer tangible goods in exchange for money. As a marketing and sales strategy, the short-term objective of any BOGO promo is to improve your sales turnover. But in the process of doing so, you also leverage boosting profits, gaining new customers, and maintaining the patronage of existing customers for long-term gains. 

Imagine you own a fast food outlet and realize that your hotdogs are selling fast, but hamburger sales are down. The cost of a hotdog is $0.50, while the price of a hamburger is $0.70, and you sell a hotdog for $3 and a hamburger for $4. You then run a time-bound BOGO promo where your customers will get one hamburger for free if they buy a hotdog. It means that the total cost to your business will be the cost of the hotdog and hamburger, which is $1.20 ($0.50 added to $0.70), while you make $1.80 in profits for each hotdog sale during the BOGO promo. The promo help increase the sales turnover for both your hotdogs and hamburgers.

How to Promote BOGO for your Restaurant Business?

You can promote BOGO for your restaurant business online by leveraging your website and social media accounts, such as; Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. You can also promote your BOGO deals at the premises of your restaurant business specifically for new and existing walk-in customers. To do this, you could pass out marketing handballs or flyers. You could also have banners and helium-filled balloons at strategic spots in and around your business.  

Benefits Of BOGO Strategy In Restaurant Business 

Your restaurant business can benefit from adopting a buy one get one free marketing strategy. Here are a few benefits worth noting:

1.Improved sale of multiple food items: With a BOGO strategy, you can improve the sales turnover of numerous food items at the same time, as shown in the hotdog and hamburger example above.

2.Boosting the sales of slow-moving food items: As seen in the hotdog and hamburger BOGO example, the owner of the fast-food outlet was able to increase the sales of their hamburgers, a slow-moving food item, before the BOGO promo commenced.

3.Getting rid of expiring inventory: Another benefit of BOGO is that you could use this strategy to eliminate expiring inventory and those items that you no longer intend to sell in the future.

For example, imagine if you have a stockpile of refrigerated packaged ice cream and want to get rid of this inventory before its fast-approaching expiration date. As an added jeopardy, wintertime is just around the corner, and you anticipate that the sale of packaged ice cream will be at an all-time low, if not non-existent. At this point, a BOGO strategy where you offer free packaged ice cream to your customers when they purchase another food item is a way to get rid of your stockpile of ice cream inventory quickly. 

4.Winning new customers: BOGO can gain new target customers in record time. The lure of a freebie attracts everyone, so your chances of landing new customers based on your BOGO promo are quite high. You have a great chance of repeat sales from your new customers during promo and even afterward.

5.Retaining the loyalty of existing customers: Your restaurant can also use BOGO to maintain the loyalty and patronage of existing customers. Your loyal customers also serve as a point of reference for prospective customers, and their contribution to attracting new customers to your business cannot be overemphasized. 

You can develop different restaurant promo ideas to encourage your existing customers to keep buying from your restaurant.  For example, you could incorporate a BOGO promo in loyalty programs designed for your current customers. You could also include a BOGO promo when your existing customer successfully refers new customers to your restaurant business.

BOGO vs Discount Code

There is a clear difference between BOGO and a discount code. For starters, BOGO is not a direct discount offer on a purchased item. For example, if the price of your hotdog is $3, the price does not change but remains the same during the BOGO promo period. The catch is that your customer buys your hotdog at the prevailing price but gets a hamburger for free. However, with a discount code, you offer your customer a percentage discount on a specific food item or the purchase of collective food items. 

A discount strategy for restaurants could be offering customers a discount upon purchasing food items worth a certain amount of money. For example, you could offer a 10% discount on $9 worth of hotdogs. As a restaurant owner, you could randomly provide loyal customers with discount codes sent to them via email or phone text. Your customer can purchase any food item at a specified discount rate with the discount code. 

In Conclusion

For your e-service restaurant business, you could also adopt a BOGO sales online strategy where your customers receive complimentary food items on their online orders. This strategy is great for direct orders as well as curbside pickup businesses where your customers order food items online and are offered other food items for free when they pick up their order.

OrderEm is a customer engagement platform with customer incentives. OrderEm's unique formula combines the Buy One Get One (BOGO) campaigns with your customer data to help you easily run and manage your BOGO campaigns across all your channels from one single platform.