Take Away Coffee Is Easy Money For Your Business. Are you doing it right?

Are you leaving between £13k and £39k per year on the table by missing out on take away coffee?

We know take away coffee is where a huge profit opportunity lies.

Increasing turnover from people coming in to buy a coffee, then disappearing again is a great way to sell a lot of coffee, get your brand out and about and reduce your overall overheads. It’s WIN WIN WIN!

Is it as easy as just sticking a sign up outside though? Well…no, unfortunately it’s a little bit more complicated than that BUT not a whole lot more.

The best place to start is by looking at who your customers are and if you are not sure then do not worry. We’ve already produced a blog about how to break down who exactly your customers are and work out what to say to them here.

Now it’s about tailoring your offer to meet the needs of your customers. In our example from the previous blog, we used the ethical decision-making of ‘Cafetière Cathryn’ to look at using VegWare (fully compostable products) cups and offering a buyback scheme for return take away coffee customers.

Also in the example in that blog, we looked at 2-3 potential different customer types that you may have. If you identified 2-3 different customers and could target your product at those specific groups, hit their pain points, make them want to come to your venue, you could add a serious amount to your turnover. Let’s say you set a target of selling 25 take away coffees a day to each of those customer groups that’s 25-75 extra cups of coffee per day giving you that awesome EXTRA £39k per year you are currently leaving on the table.

Some key things to remember for a good take away coffee service are:

• Speed – not just of the coffee but of the overall customer journey
• Quality – just because it’s going out, doesn’t mean you can drop on quality
• Customisation Station – the place where your sugars etc go; is it in the right place and well stocked?
• Reward scheme – a classic marketing tactic and easily implemented
• The Upsell – did you want a piece of cake or muffin to go with that?
• Promotions – try a new espresso or new syrup or something, mix it up for your repeat customers

Here’s a twist though…what about data collection?

In sales and marketing it’s key to always be thinking about how you can keep contact points with customers. You may have a guy that comes in every day for a coffee to go but doesn’t realise that you have a fantastic lunch menu offer because he comes in and doesn’t look at your signs, he just wants a coffee.

What about offering an opportunity to sign up to your mailing list in return for some extra value? Maybe it’s a discount code, maybe it’s a competition?

Generating these email addresses can also be done at the point of sale

“Would you like me to email you a copy of your receipt?”

With the right infrastructure you can make that happen really easily. This can be really powerful!!

You then start layering the customer experience on top of that.

Put your comfy chairs near the window, let people walking by see people having a coffee inside. In the summer get those doors open and get your coffee smell pouring into the street to attract people coming through. An easy little touch might be to put retail coffee bags in the window and just give them a gentle squeeze pushing that wonderful coffee smell.

Little things like that are going to make someone stop. Once they’ve stopped they will be greeted by the perfect message for them either on a window sticker or an a-board or however you want to tell your story. The amount of people that will not only become customers but STAY customers will genuinely blow your mind!

Are you not doing take away coffee but would like to? We have a complete starter kit for take away coffee just click below to enquire: