When you sit down and look at a restaurant menu, there's a psychological standpoint for what you're viewing. In many cases, the menu has been engineered to show you the most popular menu items to make a sale and increase profits.
It's no secret that 80% of sales come from about 20% of the items on your menu for pizzeria business.
For a pizzeria menu, the right engineering can help you make more sales and influence the sale of certain items. You may use these pizza menu tips to:
- Increase sales for high-profit margin items
- Boost revenue
A few engineering ideas to add to your restaurant menu template are:
5 Restaurant Menu Tips to Boost Sales
1. 7 Pizzeria Menu Items in Each Section
If you have a lot of pizza restaurant menu ideas, it's easy to overwhelm your customers by filling the menu with dozens of items in each section. However, every section of your menu should have a maximum of seven menu items.
For example:
- 7 appetizers
- 7 entrГ©es
- 7 desserts
From a psychological standpoint, seven is a magic number that doesn't overwhelm the customer. When people sit down to look at a menu, they often spend less than two full minutes looking at their choices.
If the menu overwhelms the customer with far too many items, guess what they'll choose? The same safe-bet option that they've tried in the past.
2. Add Colors to Influence Purchases
Colors impact emotions, even on your pizza restaurant menu. There's an entire concept of color theory and its relation to emotions. Colors are so powerful that they often subconsciously impact a person's emotions more than words.
If you add colors to your menu, you'll improve the odds of a customer making certain choices.
For example, the following colors can be used for specific effects:
- Blue should be avoided because it's a tiring color that should only be used in the seafood section of your menu - if you even have one.
- Green is ideal for salads and "green," organic sections of your menu.
- Orange is the right choice for impulse purchases, such as encouraging a person to purchase a dessert item that they're looking at but not buying because they're worried about calories.
- Red creates a sense of passion and is known for causing people to take action. If you have red near items or specials, it improves the odds of purchasing these items.
- Yellow can bring attention to certain sections of a menu and may be used to invoke a feeling of happiness.
When adding in new pizzeria menu ideas, be sure that you consider the color choices you make because they can drive sales to menu items that offer the best profit margins.
3. Hack Your Menu's Negative Space
If you look at your pizza restaurant menu, do you see negative space? Negative space is the open, white space in a menu that's between items or sections. Many pizza places tend to look at negative space as a bad thing, but it's actually quite beneficial.
The negative space draws the patron's attention and should be used to promote sales.
In fact, we recommend placing your most profitable menu items near negative space to improve sales. The trick is to create negative space near the items you want to sell the most. Additionally, add a photo to sell dishes.
For example:
- Add negative space near your highest profit-margin pizza
- Add a picture of the pizza here, too
You don't need to add pictures for every item you sell. But when you use pictures strategically, you'll improve the sale of these items by as much as 30%. For example, if you have a delectable dessert that people seem to never order, place white space and a picture of the item near it to see if sales improve.
4. Leverage the Power of Placement
Many pizza places throw their menu together without giving the placement of many items any thought. If you're not using the power of placement properly, you're missing out on sales and should redesign your menu.
If you have a two- or three-fold menu, studies show us that customers will look in a triangle pattern, such as:
- Middle
- Top right
- Top left
In the restaurant industry, we call this the "Golden Triangle." Using this triangle, it's possible to design a menu that promotes sales of certain items. For example, you may want to:
- Place items at the center and upper right of the menu to improve sales
- Put item sales or specials in the center of the menu for maximum exposure
- Use the top-left of the menu for low margin items
Using the approach above, you can cause patrons to purchase more profitable items and fewer, less-profitable items.
5. Attract with Lower-Priced Items
Sometimes, it's acceptable to trick diners into purchasing a high-priced item. We're not being deceptive, but what this means is to use a low-priced item to attract attention to high-margin items.
For example, let's assume that you sell plain pizza for a low price but at high profits.
You may want to place your expensive pizza with a lower menu price right underneath your plain pizza on the menu. The idea is simple:
- Customers see your most expensive item and think "that's too much for me"
- They look up and see the plain pizza and buy it
From a customer standpoint, they've made a good decision by purchasing your cheaper item. But for you, the item has a much higher profit margin, so it's a win-win situation. Decoy items, often your most expensive and lowest profit margin items, can be used to boost the sales of your items with the best profit margins using this approach.
Hacking your pizzeria's menu is one of the best things you can do to improve sales.
You may spend a lot of time revising and changing your menu over the years. But if you follow the tips above, it's possible to use psychology to get in the mind of consumers and sell more of the high profit-margin items that boost your income.