More and more restaurants, cafes, breweries, and drive-thrus are moving away from traditional menu signs towards digital menus. If you think about it, you’ve probably seen or even ordered off of a digital restaurant menu recently. In fact, digital restaurant signage analyst Lyle Bunn found that 80% of adults had seen digital signage in the past month, and 70% reported making an unplanned purchase because of it. Going digital with the signage for your restaurant business is a smart move for many reasons, it provides an opportunity to cut costs, can make your customer’s experience more fun and engaging, and digital signage is even proven to increase your sales!
What is a Digital Restaurant Menu?
Digital restaurant menus are comprised of three basic components: a screen, a connection to a content delivery system hardware and some software. This simple technology, along with some creative text, images or even video content, can bring your restaurant menu to life. Your digital menu could take shape as a large display near the drive-through window, a touch-screen kiosk at the entrance to your restaurant, a wall-mounted screen at the order counter, even small electronic menus at the tables for your diners to view… the possibilities are endless!
Reasons to Switch to a Digital Restaurant Menu
Some of the key reasons to switch to digital restaurant menus include:
- Cut costs and material use: With digital restaurant menus, you can make small changes with a few clicks of a button, rather than redoing or reprinting an entire menu board and distributing to multiple locations. This allows you to promote specials more easily and keep your menu fresh and exciting, keeping customers coming back. No need to manually flip your menu from breakfast to lunch, and so on.
- Engage all generations: In the digital age, all consumers are more conditioned to expect entertaining, dynamic, ever-changing content with plenty of visuals and video. This is particularly true for younger generations.
- Increase your messaging: The human brain processes visuals at a much higher rate than text, so you can transmit more information to your customers by incorporating photos and videos of your food into your digital restaurant menus.
- Improve your customer experience and decrease perceived wait times: Studies show that digital restaurant signage and menus are more entertaining to customers while they wait, decreasing perceived waiting times and increasing customer satisfaction NET time (no extra time).
- Maximize sales: Studies show an overall increase in sales between 3-5% after the installation of a digital menu board, and even higher increases for specifically-promoted or highlighted menu items.
Creative Ideas for Digital Restaurant Signage and Menus
Digital restaurant signage and digital menus present endless opportunities for creative display and advertising – below are a few interesting examples to help get you brainstorming:
- Encourage online engagement from your “foodie” followers by incorporating social media into the digital signage at your restaurant. For example, you could display Instagram, Twitter or Facebook feeds and offer a free product or discount to those who tag your restaurant or leave a review to increase your online presence.
- Gastropubs, tap houses and breweries have started using digital menus to their advantage, incorporating visual icons to transmit more information about the beers they have on tap. For example, you could include the brewery logo, a keg icon showing how much beer is left in the keg, color codes for different types of beer, and glass icons to show the available draft sizes.
- A newer trend, some restaurants are starting to use interactive, touch-screen menus where customers can flip through options at their table, a kiosk or while waiting in line. Some even allow customers to order with the click of a button. If the digital menu is right at their fingertips while they eat, they can continue to browse and place additional orders more easily.
Digital Restaurant Menu Recap
These are just a few of the many possibilities you can explore with digital signage at your restaurant. With so many exciting ideas to build on and with countless benefits to you, your business and your customers… what are you waiting for? Go digital today and stay ahead of the curve tomorrow!
