Do you own a drive-thru coffee business? Are you worried about your sales figures? Do you want to know how to sell more coffee at your drive-thru restaurant? Well, if your answer to these three questions is yes, this post offers drive-thru restaurant ideas that should get your coffee shop up and running and improve your revenues.

Drive-thru Selling

Before we reveal our five ways to sell more coffee at your drive-thru coffee shop business, it is important to go back to basics. First, you need to be clear on why people prefer buying coffee from a drive-thru coffee shop business. There are three main reasons:

1. A lot of people love drinking good-tasting coffee.

2. Many people prefer getting their coffee while waiting (for a short while) in their vehicles.

3. Most people prefer quick service, especially during the early morning rush hour.

Now it goes without saying that whatever drive-thru selling strategies you adopt should be primarily driven by these three main reasons why people would be open to buying coffee from your shop while in transit. 

Here are five time-tested ways for your drive-thru coffee shop to sell more today.

1. Make Great Tasting Coffee

Your coffee shop is only as good as the coffee customers get from it. You may experience a boost in sales in the first few days of opening the drive-thru coffee shop if your coffee tastes delicious. You will immediately experience a massive drop in demand and sales if you haven’t put effort into this most important revenue-driving force. 

So the first thing to ensure you can sell more coffee is to improve the quality of coffee you serve. To do this, you must set standards through coaching and training of your staff members. Your staff needs to be able to make commonly requested coffee like espresso and cappuccino with the very same taste every time. 

You also need the right coffee-making equipment installed to ensure that your coffee shop can deliver on the promise of serving excellent coffee to match the overall experience at your drive-thru delivery shop. 

2. Define Staff Positions to Improve Drive-thru Delivery 

No efficiency is gained if your staff does not have clearly defined duties, roles, and positions. Your staff needs to know their positions to help your coffee business function efficiently. It also lets you know who is supposed to do what in your business. 

It further helps when you evaluate performance or have to attend to feedback and complaints from customers and other staff members. But most importantly, it helps improve the speed of service offered by your drive-thru coffee shop, which is an essential element of your business and one of the reasons why anyone would want to buy coffee from you. Essentially, you have about five dedicated positions to fill out, and these include the following;

• The first staff position is the person working at the bar. This staff is responsible for preparing the coffee in quick time and should be saddled with only this responsibility.
• The second staff position is the window cashier. You should employ staff to work as window cashiers for your drive-thru coffee shop. Each window cashier should have an independent cash register as well. 
• The third position is held by a greeter whose job is to meet with customers in their vehicles and cordially take their orders. This person has to have a disarming, warm, charming, and friendly personality since they are the first people to meet your customers.
• An expediter holds the fourth position and is the person that does the dirty work (so to speak). They are the one that does all the work the staff in other positions cannot perform. But their job is just as important as they make all the other positions function effectively. 
• The fifth position is handled by the server, who may be someone going over to a customer's vehicle to give them their coffee or someone at a window handing down the ordered coffee to a customer. The server has to be courteous as well, as they interact with the customer, albeit briefly.

3. Apply Upselling Strategies

Upselling is a marketing strategy where you convince your customers to buy other products along with coffee. There are many ways to upsell, but what is important here is that you could attract more patronage if you offer tasty treats like doughnuts and sandwiches. 

Remember that your customers are often those in a rush to work or business meeting early in the morning, say between 7 to 11 AM. That is when most people have breakfast, so if you have a treat that your customers can order along with their coffee, your shop will become a welcoming destination for many people as they do not have to make more than one stop while rushing to work. For example, you can take a few pointers from McDonald's upsell and apply them to your drive-thru coffee shop business. 

4. Sign Boards Can Help Drive in Sales to your Coffee Shop

Good old-fashioned signage can direct people to your coffee shop in no time. A typical working person's life is all about routines; they wake up in the morning and drive to work along a similar route. You can become a routine of people by letting them know they can get quickly made, quality coffee in your drive-thru coffee shop. Before you know it, you will have regular customers, and in time, you can predict the time and type of order these customers prefer. It will eventually improve your efficiency, productivity, turnover, and margins.

5. Reward Customers with Perks

One of the best ideas on how to upsell drive-thru for your coffee shop is to offer rewards to your customers. For example, regular customers may be given an extra cup of coffee and a tasty treat for their loyalty to your business. Hopefully, the reward system works out to the point where your customers order the treats along with their coffee on normal days. 

The coffee shop business has recently risen partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic of the last two years. However, as a fallout of the pandemic, many people have now gotten used to the idea of ordering coffee from the comfort of their vehicles. You can give people more reasons to patronize your drive-thru coffee shop by rewarding them with perks that also tell them you appreciate their patronage.

In Conclusion 

So the idea of a drive-thru coffee shop will not likely wane anytime soon. But with many more business owners with perfect locations buying into the concept, competition is now fierce. Only those businesses that can provide an excellent drive-thru delivery experience will be destined to strive and thrive for the long haul. You, too, can be amongst the high achievers with the five strategies to boost your coffee sales mentioned in this post. So take advantage of these strategies to increase sales and grow your profit margins today.