Why your business needs a digital menu board

If you are a restaurant owner, you probably know the pain of spending money on changing up your menu offerings or making new posters to attract new customers after every few months. If you are spending too much money on these items and not recovering the cost through your sales, or you are thinking about overhauling your menu, then perhaps it is time to consider changing your format to a digital menu board.

Aside from the aesthetics of the board itself and the possibilities it offers, it also extends its benefits to your customer satisfaction levels, revenue collection and efficiency levels. Read on to find out about the advantages of using these board for your restaurant business.

Lowers cost of changing details

A traditional poster or sign board is nice because it has a classic old-school feel, but a digital menu board will reduce the cost of printing out the details on these items. In turn, this shows your customers, both regular and new, that you have new foods for them to try, and you will draw more people in and make your offerings enticing. In fact, a digital menu system helps you control the eyes of the customer by directing them to certain offerings that you have and make them interested.

There are plenty of tools you can use, fortunately – for instance, taking advantages of animated gifs and videos to capture their attention, or entertain those who are waiting in line. While a chalkboard menu seems nice, you like y have a lot of information you need to put across and so little time and space – and you can save both by customizing your menus in this format and make things look interesting.

Allows you to change your menu easily

Whenever you want to change a menu sign, one of the pains that come with the entire process is finding a good designer, paying them to change the menu, and then cover the costs that arise during the re-printing process. However, a digital menu displays board allows you to make changes quickly with no extra costs on your end.

This will then make it much easier for you to manage all the food prices and items, and update the menu as you see fit. You can even remove non-performing options, add new items, and make the menu interesting through moving different foods around.

Allows you to display your marketing messages

You can also show your marketing messages – especially considering that traditional advertising methods are very expensive for a smaller business and they barely offer returns on investment as they did in the past.

For instance, if you want to highlight something new that you have recently introduced in the menu, you can use the digital menu displays to inform customers that there is a special promotion available. Or, a scenario where you want to host a special event at the end of the year, and you advertise it on the digital board.

Since the method of display evolves rapidly, you can change the videos and media that you use in order to attract the attention of the customers.

Helps in easier upselling

This is one area that digital display boards beat out the traditional methods of posters and signs: they are masters at upselling different menu items. In particular, this becomes even more effective when you pair them with a POS (Point of Sale) system – when you are using this integration, the menu can easily show the customers complimentary menu offerings to result in a huge sales boost.

For instance, a pizza restaurant can show different breadsticks and salads that customers can offer when they choose a specific pizza, and this increases the sales. You might wonder why this is the case, but the reason is very simple: an image is worth a thousand words. If you make the images as enticing as possible (like pairing delicious-looking breadsticks with a nice, cooling beverage), customers are more enticed to order – this strategy is also used frequently by food companies that want to promote their products.

It streamlines the ordering process

These digital menu boards show a lot of beautiful images and videos of your foods, and this will encourage the customer to make their choices quickly. Rather than the traditional menu style that makes them have to read a bunch of words and probably ask a lot of questions before choosing something (since they might not know what it is), they can check the different presentations and choose the ones they like the most.

This in turn, increases efficiency in ordering. You will notice that you are taking orders faster and you are serving more people, which will also increase your revenues at the end of the day.

In addition, this will also boost customer service ratings because customers are not waiting for too long to get served. This might seem small, but it makes a lot of differences between customers who never return and those who keep coming back.

Allows the strategy of 'day parting'

Most restaurants that follow the traditional format have traditional menus for lunch, breakfast and dinner – however, with a digital menu board, these become obsolete. You will never forget to change the paper menus again, as you can set the timers in the digital board to change automatically to dinner, lunch and breakfast menus.

In addition, the use of graphics and media choices will allow you to preset and display the appropriate images when you want and how you want it to be. This will ultimately set you free to focus on customers and give them the best service.

Helps you comply with the Menu Labeling Laws

It is important for restaurants to comply with the law – and many states require them to publish the calorie counts of the items in the menu. While this is difficult in the traditional format, the digital menu signage boards make it easy.

In addition, you can change the details just in case you add or remove certain items from the menu, without having to order more printed menus.

Final thoughts

Getting a digital menu board is a part of evolving in your restaurant business, and it is a good decision to make due to the cost benefits it gives.