Why blanket discounts don’t fill quiet nights

When a Tuesday looks thin, the reflex is to post an offer: 20% off food, two-for-one cocktails, kids eat free. Sometimes it works. Often it doesn’t, and when it does, it can cost more than it brings in.

Who uses a blanket discount?

A discount posted to everyone is used by whoever happens to see it and fancies it. That includes:

• Regulars who were coming anyway. You’ve just given them money off a meal they’d have paid full price for.
• Deal-hunters. They come for the offer and move on to the next one.
• Guests on the wrong night. Unless you restrict it, a weekday offer gets stretched to Friday.

Very few of those are the guest you actually want: someone who likes your place, wouldn’t otherwise have come on a Tuesday, and might make it a habit.

The evidence from daily deals

The deal-site boom of the early 2010s was a large, public test of blanket discounting. Utpal Dholakia of Rice University surveyed 150 businesses that had run Groupon promotions between 2009 and 2010. About a third hadn’t made a profit from their deal, and just under half said they wouldn’t run another.

In the businesses that lost money, only about 25% of deal customers spent beyond the value of their voucher, and only about 15% came back for a second visit. Restaurants found it harder than most: around 58% of those surveyed made money from their promotion, against 82% of spas.

The deal brought people in. It mostly didn’t bring them back.

The hidden cost: your price

Discounting also teaches guests what your food is worth. If your main course is regularly 30% off, the full price starts to look like the exception. Once guests learn to wait for the offer, the offer stops filling quiet nights and starts emptying full-price ones.

What works better

A good quiet-night offer is narrow on purpose:

1. Aim it at guests who’ve already visited. They know and like you. An offer gives them a reason to come back sooner, rather than paying a stranger to try you once.
2. Make it valid only when you need it. Monday to Thursday, January, the week after half term: whatever your quiet periods are.
3. Limit how many you give away. Decide the prize, how often it’s won and a daily cap, so the cost is known in advance.
4. Make it feel earned, not advertised. An offer won at the table feels like a treat. One shouted on a billboard feels like a sale.
5. Count every redemption. You should be able to say how many offers were used and on which nights, not guess from how busy it felt.

Retention beats reach

Reichheld and Sasser’s research found that keeping customers does more for profit than most businesses expect. A quiet-night strategy built on guests who already like you is cheaper and kinder to your margins than one built on strangers with a coupon.

That’s how Clink works. Prizes are won at the table, not posted to the world. You set the odds, the value and the nights they can be used, and staff scan each one, so you can see exactly what came back through the door.