Blog
23 Ways to Increase Restaurant Sales
SevenRooms
5 min read
Aug 21, 2026
SevenRooms
5 min read
Aug 21, 2026
Running a restaurant is hard—but keeping it profitable is even harder.
In an industry known for razor-thin margins and high failure rates, financial pressure is a constant companion. Today’s diners are more selective than ever, and the competition isn’t just across the street—it’s everywhere.
That shift is reflected in the latest restaurant industry trends report, which shows diners moving fluidly between delivery, pickup and dine-in while expecting more personalized and seamless experiences across every touchpoint.
To not only survive but thrive, restaurants need to think creatively about how to boost sales—from the dining room to digital channels and everything in between.
The good news? You don’t need a full brand overhaul or a celebrity chef to make it happen. We’ve rounded up 23 proven, practical ways to increase restaurant revenue, whether you’re aiming to attract new guests, win more business from your regulars, upsell in-house diners or maximize your takeout and delivery potential.
Want to fill more seats and grow your guest base? These ideas are designed to help you get discovered—and booked—by new diners.
Google is the first stop for many hungry diners. Recent SevenRooms research shows that 1 in 3 people discover and book restaurants through Google. That means your Google Business Profile can be one of your most valuable marketing tools—and best of all, it’s free.
Recent updates to the platform, like Reserve with Google, prepayment options and social media linking, make it easier than ever for diners to find and book your venue.
After claiming your listing, be sure to add your direct reservation and online ordering links to save on fees and drive more profitable bookings.
To further stand out from other local businesses, add high-quality photos, menu links and SEO optimized tags that highlight your offerings and ambiance.
If you want to take it further, you can run paid Google Ads that target high-intent diners searching for terms like “best brunch near me” or “rooftop restaurants in New York.” Paired with an optimized GBP, it’s one of the most effective ways to boost visibility and fill seats.
Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your restaurant show up in local searches like “vegan brunch in Austin” or “late-night sushi Chicago.” Appearing in these searches drives traffic to your website, where you can convert visitors into diners.
Search engine optimization helps your website and Google Business Profile rank for both branded and unbranded keywords—terms diners use when they don’t yet know where they want to eat.
In fact, 50% of U.S. restaurant operators say they’re investing in organic Google strategies in 2025, making it one of the most popular (and cost-effective) digital marketing channels.
To improve your local SEO:
Ranking higher in search doesn’t happen overnight—but it can drive consistent, long-term revenue when done right.
Social media isn’t just for aesthetics—it’s a discovery engine. Forty-nine percent of diners in the U.S. use social media to find and book restaurants. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Facebook help you stay visible, build loyalty, and drive direct bookings.
Start by setting up accounts on the platforms that align with your ideal guest—whether that’s Gen Z foodies on TikTok or local families on Facebook. From there:
Want to expand your reach? Paid social ads let you target people who live and work near your restaurant and whose demographics match your existing customers.
Platforms like Meta (Facebook and Instagram) use geotargeting, so you can run ads that only show up to users within a specific ZIP code, neighborhood or radius. This makes your budget go further and ensures your promotions reach people who are most likely to dine with you.
Together, organic content and paid targeting make social media one of the most effective ways to turn scrolls into sales.
Reservation and third-party delivery marketplaces like OpenTable and Uber Eats can help you reach new guests who may not have found you otherwise. But while they offer visibility, they also come with drawbacks—like commission fees, limited guest data and competing restaurant listings.
A SevenRooms restaurant discovery and booking report found that nearly 80% of customers prefer to support restaurants directly by booking via the restaurant’s website or calling the venue. If you use third-party platforms, make sure you're leveraging them as a gateway to build direct relationships.
Add marketing inserts to delivery orders encouraging first-time guests to order directly next time. Include QR codes or promo cards in your check presenter that link to your reservation site.
The goal: use these platforms to get discovered, then move guests into your own ecosystem. This shift helps you build stronger relationships, boost loyalty and save on cover fees—savings you can reinvest in enhancing the on-site guest experience.
If your city hosts annual restaurant week events, consider participating in the event to attract potential customers. Not only does this give your venue extra exposure, but it also drives more foot traffic.
Restaurant weeks are the perfect time to show off signature dishes, and experiment with new ones. While you’ve got diners' attention, advertise your private events, group booking opportunities, loyalty program and more. You might also consider offering an exclusive, limited-time promotion available only for restaurant week guests, enticing them to return again soon.
Influencer marketing can be a great way to attract new diners, especially Millennials and Gen Zers. SevenRooms research shows that 27% of restaurant bookings come from influencer content.
Partner with local micro influencers and brand advocates to market key moments for your restaurant, from grand openings to menu changes to events. The key is authenticity: Choose partners who actually love your restaurant and will create content that feels genuine, not transactional.
Follow these tips to create targeted marketing strategies that drive loyalty and boost your bottom line.
A walk-in spends the same as a reservation and leaves nothing behind. No name, no preferences, no way to invite them back.
Run the waitlist on a device at the host stand and every walk-in becomes a profile: contact details, party size, what they ordered, how long they waited. That record is what makes the second visit sellable.
95% of first-time diners never return. A walk-in you cannot contact is guaranteed to be one of them.
Implement a customer loyalty program that lets customers accumulate points for on-site and online orders and redeem points for free food, exclusive experiences and more.
SevenRooms’ 2025 U.S. Restaurant Industry Trends report found that 48% of consumers prefer connecting with restaurants via text, especially when it comes to receiving time-sensitive messages and reservation updates.
Encourage diners to “opt in” to your SMS marketing in your reservations widget and social media profiles. Then send updates about last-minute openings, events and promotions to generate bookings.
“Keep your messaging as short and concise as possible—even if your platform doesn’t restrict character count. Use images to make your texts stand out and include links to encourage reservations and event ticket purchases,” Henry Kaminski, CMO of Fabio Viviani Hospitality, tells SevenRooms.
With this strategy, Fabio Viviani Hospitality generated more than $440,000 in revenue in just six months from their text marketing campaigns using SevenRooms.
While email marketing is known to boost sales, it's even better at getting customers to return when it's personalized.
Targeted, automated emails generate 12X more revenue per email than mass sends.
To increase covers, tailor campaigns to highlight promotions, menu updates, exclusive offers and special events. For example, Balance Hospitality Group rewards loyalty by offering specific customer segments early access to events via email, generating over $1.3M and 18,000 covers with an impressive average open rate of 59% in just 18 months.
Try something similar: send invites to tastings, cooking classes or mixology workshops to past attendees. Share your wine list in advance with cocktail lovers, or unlock “secret” recipes in exchange for email signups.
Discounting a full Saturday gives away revenue you were going to earn anyway. The money sits in the shifts that run at half capacity.
Segment by when people already book, then send a targeted offer to the guests whose habits fit the gap: the early-week regulars, the guests who only ever book late, the ones who live within walking distance.
An early-week tasting menu or a bar-only event built for one segment fills seats without teaching your Saturday guests to wait for a deal.
Follow these creative ideas to increase sales by convincing diners to spend more during each visit.
Leveraging menu engineering when you design your menu encourages diners to spend more. Simple adjustments to the order of your menu items, removing currency signs from each dish, descriptive storytelling and the reworking overall color scheme are all known psychological tricks restaurants can use to influence choice.
For example, restaurant owners tend to write longer descriptions for the dishes they want to sell more of, or price dishes using round numbers when they want to make the establishment feel more exclusive.
Most menus carry one price all week, so a Tuesday at 6pm and a Saturday at 8pm sell at the same rate into completely different demand.
Revenue management tools read booking pace, party size and the historical demand for each shift, then show where a premium will hold and where it will cost you the cover.
Start with the seats guests already treat as premium: the window, the chef’s counter, the patio in season. Pricing those separately turns a debate into a setting.
Let guests pre-purchase birthday cakes, champagne toasts served upon arrival, flowers on the table and more through prepaid reservation upgrades.
Pre-paid add-ons are an easy way to increase customer satisfaction and seamlessly collect prepaid revenue at booking without sacrificing the user experience.
For example, The Island Quarter used SevenRooms restaurant reservation system to offer upgrades during booking, generating $41,000 in prepaid experiences in just six months.
Here’s what guests see after selecting a reservation time at their fine dining venue, Cleaver & Wake:
Learn More: How to Upgrade Your Guest Experience & Grow Revenue with Online Payments
Push past the boundaries of traditional dining by offering guests unforgettable experiences—think tasting and prix fixe menus, chef’s tables, kitchen tours, or dinners with live jazz—and make them available for a premium.
The more personalized, the more powerful. According to SevenRooms’ 2025 survey, guests are willing to pay more for elevated, tailored touches like:
With the right restaurant management and event software, you can easily sell and manage these experiences—driving revenue and delighting guests.
If you run multiple restaurants, make sure your guests know about every venue in your portfolio, so that you can be part of more of their dining-out or ordering-in occasions. Create an automated marketing campaign that sends after their first visit. Let guests know where else they can enjoy your restaurant group’s hospitality and incentivize them to book tables or place orders.
If your venue has the space, create unique and elevated spaces that feel special—and then charge more for the table. If your restaurant has a view, take a page from the Darwin Brasserie playbook and monetize what makes your place stand out. By designating its window seats (which boast panoramic views of London landmarks like the Shard and St. Paul's Cathedral) as a premium option guests could select at booking, the venue achieved a 626% increase in digital sales within two months.
Rooftops, patios and other unique spaces can also represent new revenue streams. Consider using your patio for live music nights, or offer to host birthday parties or special events in your outdoor area.
When you know your guests and their order history, you can recommend items that increase spend.
Train your front-of-house (FOH) staff to recommend drinks, appetizers, desserts and side dishes based on guest data stored in your CRM.
Let’s say you have a guest who prefers a particular $75 bottle of wine. During their next visit, staff trained in upselling might recommend similar wines near that price point or a dish that pairs well with the flavor notes. At quick service restaurants, upselling could entail asking guests if they want to upgrade a small drink to a large one. You can also teach staff to incorporate sales techniques in their process with suggestive language like, “Sparkling or tap water?” and “Would you like to add a protein to your salad?”
Branded products can be a real revenue driver—87% of consumers would buy a different type of offering from restaurants, like cookbooks or cocktail kits, according to 2025 SevenRooms data.
From cookbooks to wearables, you can sell branded products like t-shirts, water bottles, aprons, cookbooks and even canned versions of your famous sauce; the sky’s the limit.
Restaurant businesses can also increase sales by offering different services that appeal to the masses, such as takeout or delivery options. Here are a few ways to generate income from the services.
Create the to-go version of a prix fixe menu with takeout bundles for your online ordering customers. Offer multi-course meals or large-format family-style entrees guests can pre-order and pick up.
Elevate dishes that are known to travel well and package them nicely so you can justify selling the bundles at a higher price point.
If you haven’t done so already, add an online ordering revenue stream to your business.
Joining a delivery services platform like DoorDash helps meet the growing demand for convenience, making it easier for guests to order delivery or pickup. It also expands your reach to new customers who might not discover you otherwise and simplifies the logistics of managing takeout operations.
Boost incremental revenue by upselling add-ons to deliver and online orders. For each order, configure your online ordering system to suggest add-ons that complement the items already in the cart.
Drive repeat business by cross-selling delivery to your dine-in guests and on-site reservations to your delivery diners.
For example, you can encourage guests who always dine at your restaurant to order online by offering them a promo code for their first order. Similarly, you can motivate pickup and delivery customers to join you in person by offering them upgrades via email, like a free champagne toast upon arrival.
Setting up two automated email campaigns targeting each customer segment can help you cross-promote at scale with little effort.
Thriving restaurants go beyond filling seats—they create memorable, tech-powered experiences that today’s diners crave. With the right tools to understand guest preferences and streamline operations, you can drive revenue and build lasting loyalty.
SevenRooms helps you do exactly that. Book a demo to see how our platform turns great service into long-term success.
Raise what each visit is worth and how often it repeats. Industry sales grew 4.8% in 2026 on menu pricing rather than guest counts, so the gains are going to operators selling upgrades at the booking and bringing the same guests back more often. Repeat diners already spend 27% more than first-time diners.
For most operators the problem is traffic rather than pricing. More than half reported fewer guests last year against 15% who saw an increase, while 70% of consumers say they would eat out more often if they had the money. The demand has not gone. It has become more selective.
27% more, based on US restaurant activity on the SevenRooms platform from October 2025 through March 2026. 80% of dine-in visits already go to a restaurant the guest has been to before, so the returning guest is both the likelier booking and the larger check.
Sell something at the booking. Reservations with prepaid upgrades generate 16% more revenue per cover, and the appetite is already there: 30% of guests would pay more for a special-occasion package, 25% for preferred seating and 24% for a limited-time experience.
They do when they cover every channel the guest uses. 90% of consumers would use a loyalty program spanning reservations and delivery, and 87% say a credit, discount or perk influenced them to reorder.
“An optimized GBP increases your local discoverability and makes it easy for diners to book with you,” says Ashley Do from Google Partnerships. “Done right, it’s a tool for local marketing that helps diners find exactly the information they care about and gets them in the door.”
Text marketing through SevenRooms drives an average of $1,800 per campaign and delivers 24X ROI for restaurants.
Encouraging direct booking and prepayments for reservations and special events also helps reduce cancellations and no shows.
Add merch upgrades and add-ons to your booking process. Etch. in London uses SevenRooms to upsell boxes of chocolates, aprons and a cookbook within their reservation flow.
Driving restaurant sales and delivering personalized experiences to every guest
None of the 23 tactics above depends on finding new guests. They depend on knowing the ones you have well enough to sell them something they actually wanted.
SevenRooms connects reservations, guest profiles, marketing and off-premise orders to one guest record, so every booking adds to what you know instead of starting over.