How bakers can drive sales in key moments

With Mother’s Day and Easter behind us, what better time for busy bakers to dust off their aprons and stop and reflect on how to best approach the next key moment. 

A moment presents a great opportunity for bakeries big and small to grow sales and find and connect with customers.

So what is a moment anyway? And how can they be used to extend the reach of your bakery and make your food business even more successful?

What is a Moment?

At Cookaborough we define a moment as a specific event during the year that is relevant to your customers, from Christmas to Valentine’s Day we have seen first-hand the power of moments in driving sales and allowing businesses to grow.

We have broken down step by step everything you need as a baker to create your very own Moments Plan.

Choose Your Moments

Start by identifying your moments and map them on a calendar. Avoid the temptation to include every moment, an ideal number is 8 – 10 each year, led by 2 or 3 major moments and supported by a selection of secondary moments. This number is manageable and avoids your customers feeling like they are being ‘sold’ to at every opportunity.

Some key moments include: 

• Valentine’s Day 
• Easter 
• Mother’s Day
• Bastille Day
• Christmas

TIP - Think of moments relevant to your customers such as local events, religious holidays and celebrations. 

Timing is everything

When should you start promoting a moment? When it comes to making the most of
a moment, timing is important. If you go too early or leave it too late, you’ll miss the moment. Think about when people start to plan how they’re going to celebrate and time your launch accordingly.

After analysing over 80,000 sales powered by Cookaborough we suggest the following…

• Easter - Three weeks before Good Friday.
• Christmas - By the middle of November, approximately six weeks out.
• Mother’s Day - Two weeks prior.
• Football finals - Two weeks prior.

Reduce the rush and enhance your customer's experience

Often customers will want to pick up their orders at the same time on the same day, for example, Good Friday between 9 am – 10 am can be extremely busy, with many customers arriving at the same time.

If you’re not prepared for the rush, it can create production headaches and staff stress and it risks delivering a poor customer experience with people left waiting to collect their orders.

Tip - Cookaborough you can set pick up and delivery slots allowing you to be in control and deliver a seamless experience on collection day avoiding the challenge of everyone arriving at the same time.

Take control of last-minute orders and increase your sales.

People will often leave it to the last minute to place their orders. To manage this situation, you need to maintain a connection with your customers in the lead up to the event and make it easy for them to place an order. 

Using social media and sending emails to your customer database with reminders to place orders and showing what’s on the menu will increase final orders.

TIP - Cookaborough's Automatic Order Reminder Feature results in an average order increase of +25%, making sure you never miss an order.

Bringing It All Together

It’s exciting to receive a high number of orders, but now you must produce and fulfil those orders, which can be stressful, particularly when a lot is going on at once. 

To ensure a seamless process for both front and back of house there are two reports that you will have access to through Cookaborough, that will help you manage both production and the pick & pack process.  

1. Our Automatic Order Summary gives you all the information you need to manage production and back of house. 
2. The Individual Order Summary makes pick and pack seamless. Simply staple orders ready for collection

Building a Customer Database one Moment at a Time

By attracting new customers in a key moment you can grow your database and create return customers. 

Having a customer database is one of the most valuable assets of your business. The more people on your customer database, the more successful your next major moment will be, so each should be seen as an opportunity to increase your customer database. 

By following the above steps you will be well equipt to extend your database with each key moment, in fact, our data shows that Moment Menu’s result in three times the average number of orders and double the average transaction value. 

So there you have it, in six easy steps, your bakery can be well on its way to growing one moment at a time. 

Make sure not to miss the next moment and download our comprehensive guide to Making the Most of Moments created for bakers big and small.