Marketing & Promotions
Proven Strategies to Increase Restaurant Sales in 2025 (Without Raising Prices)
5 min read
May 13, 2025
5 min read
May 13, 2025
Feeling the pressure from the National Minimum Wage increase?
With wages in the UK now rising to £12.21 an hour—an increase of 6.7%—experts forecast that restaurant owners could be on the hook for an extra £2,500 per year for each full-time employee.
Raising prices might seem like a quick fix to boost your bottom line, but it’s not the only way to increase restaurant sales.
In fact, UK restaurateurs are getting creative.
Our latest UK Restaurant Industry Trends report reveals the most innovative strategies, campaigns and marketing channels restaurants are leveraging to increase revenue and guest retention in 2025.
From retail sales and hyper-personalised marketing to seat optimisations, here are five ways to grow your restaurant’s revenue—without raising prices.
The guest journey starts long before they walk through your doors. In most cases, it begins when they’re booking a reservation.
With the right tools, you can enhance the booking process through prepaid add-ons and upgrades. SevenRooms customers who offer booking upgrades see, on average, a 35% higher spend on reservations.
Popular options include bottles of wine, champagne on arrival, tasting menus, flowers and specialty desserts.
The Island Quarter in Nottingham, home to busy restaurants Binks Yard and Cleaver & Wake, generated £33,000 in upgrades, experiences and prepayments in just six months, boosting guest retention by 10%.
With a restaurant CRM like SevenRooms, it’s also easy to track and fulfil these upgrades.
As Liam Morgan, Sales and Marketing Manager, shares: “At our fine-dining restaurant Cleaver & Wake, customers have the ability to preorder flowers and champagne. We set it up through SevenRooms so each of these upgrades receives an automatic tag of ‘flowers.’ Then, we simply pull the report each morning and it takes us two seconds to pull the flowers.”
But don’t stop at F&B. In our report, 77% of Brits say they’re interested in unique retail offerings from restaurants. Here are the top three:
Etch. in London upsells boxes of chocolates, aprons and a cookbook within their reservation flow. Not only is it a great way to boost total sales, it promotes and strengthens brand awareness, keeping you top of mind.
Adding upgrades with prepayments also helps reduce last minute cancellations and no-shows.
A memorable dining experience isn’t just about the food anymore. Today’s guests crave unique, personalised moments that turn meals into memories—and they’re willing to pay more for them.
Experiences consumers are willing to spend more on:
Diners are also looking for personalised experiences, like being offered custom beverage pairings (47%) and their preferred seating (43%).
For example, Darwin Brasserie in London’s Sky Garden started offering guests the chance to upgrade to a premium window seat within the booking process, which led to a 626% increase in digital sales in just two months.
“With food and beverage, there’s always a margin,” General Manager Giovanni Abbattista notes. “But with the window seat charge, every pound goes straight to the bottom line.”
Not only is this a fantastic revenue driver, it also takes the pressure off of the team having to manually field window seat requests, which often led to disappointments.
“Now, it’s completely transparent—guests can reserve the table they want upfront, which has massively reduced complaints about window seats requests,” shared Giovanni.
The magic behind giving guests these experiences is that you don’t need to completely reinvent the wheel. All you need to do is spotlight what makes your venue unique and special—think tables with a view, personalised tastings with your sommelier, a private booth or chef’s table upgrade.
These customer experiences create new revenue streams, support a smarter restaurant marketing strategy and help you turn first-timers into loyal customers.
While guest-facing upgrades and experiences drive pre-service revenue, real growth often comes from what’s happening behind the scenes—how efficiently you manage your books.
That’s where smart revenue management strategies come into play.
Start by analysing your average reservation turn times. If your party of four typically dines for two hours but your reservation slots are spaced every three, you're losing a full hour of revenue potential.
Adjust your pacing to reflect guest behaviour—especially on high-demand nights when every seat counts. For slower shifts, flex your reservation inventory to allow guests more time or add more seating times to encourage bookings.
Next, optimise your floor plan. Assign tables by party size so you’re not seating two guests at a four-top when demand is high. On busy nights, block smaller parties from booking larger tables and direct them to deuces instead.
A smart reservation and table management system like SevenRooms automates this process, analysing thousands of seating combinations in seconds and suggesting real-time improvements—so you can fill every table with intention and turn them at the right pace.
Imagine this: you just enjoyed a fabulous dinner, excellent food and amazing hospitality. The next day, an email from the GM lands in your in-box with a thank-you note and a direct link to book your next visit. No searching for reservations, no extra clicks, just a personal touch that makes you feel like a VIP.
That’s the power of personalised marketing. With the right technology, you can scale that experience for every guest.
Automated emails allow you to reach more of your existing customer base and attract new customers directly. In just a few months, Fazenda generated £70,000 in reservation revenue through personalised, automated marketing emails, building stronger guest relationships in the process.
While email remains the favoured communication channel for most UK diners, nearly 41% prefer connecting via text. On average, SevenRooms clients are generating £1,391 for each text campaign, with one campaign alone generating £54,128 in revenue.
Personalisation isn’t about flashy gimmicks, it’s about knowing who your guests are and what they value.
With an integrated CRM and Marketing solution like SevenRooms, you can build rich guest profiles—capturing data like dietary preferences, visit history and special occasions—and use it to send targeted email and text campaigns that drive real results. Even better? You can track the ROI of every campaign down to the reservation and revenue.
Google is a major revenue stream for restaurant businesses. Nearly a third of Brits use Google when looking for new restaurants, and many are booking directly with Reserve with Google, skipping third-party platforms entirely.
By activating Reserve with Google and ensuring your availability is kept up to date through an integrated reservation system, your Google Business Profile transforms into a high-converting digital storefront. Diners can discover, research and reserve—all without leaving Google Search or Maps.
This seamless customer experience isn’t just more convenient for diners—it’s a competitive advantage.
Restaurants that show real-time availability are more likely to appear in local search results, especially for high-intent searches like “best restaurants open now near me.” Google’s search engine prioritises listings that offer immediate action and are well optimized for search (SEO).
With rising costs and constant pressure, it can feel like a lot to manage. But the right technology can ease that burden, helping you deliver SuperHuman Hospitality™ at scale.
Discover how SevenRooms all-in-one CRM, Marketing & Operations platform helps you boost efficiency and build guest loyalty—all while increasing your profit margins. Book a demo today.
