6 Menu Design Hacks that Influence Guests to Spend More

You’ve got the guests in the door, whether they’re from your island or tourists visiting a food outlet at your Caribbean resort property, one of the goals now is to influence your guest into spending a little more than they would have and a discreet way to do that is with your menu design. Here are 6 menu design hacks that will get your guests to spend more:

1. Leave off the currency symbols. We’re all trained to equate a series of currency symbols with degrees of wallet pain as in $ means not expensive and $$$$ is fine dining prices so by the time your customer has read through the appetizers, if you have currency symbols next to your prices, they’ve seen several $ and subconsciously they’re going to start thinking $$$$! Along the same line of thinking, round your prices so that you can drop the decimal and 00s or numbers following it.

Basically, make your price look as small as possible

2. Examine the language on your menu. If an item isn’t selling as well as others, part of the description of it could be the problem. Keep the names of foods consistent with your target market. For example: if most of the guests who frequent your restaurant are American and a menu item description includes the word courgette, a self-conscious diner may not speak up and ask what it means, instead ordering something else when a dish that included zucchini would have been more appealing.

3. Going off of #2… pay attention to the names of your dishes and add descriptors. Don’t just call it ‘Jamaican Jerk Chicken,’ call it ‘Local Famous 24 Hour Marinated Jamaican Jerk Chicken.’

It turns eating this menu item into an event to be experienced

Furthermore, (and because we love our numbers here at coralrange) a field experiment showed that not only did descriptive dish titles positively influence how a guest experienced their order, it also increased sales of the item by 27%.

4. Design your menu so that items with high margins stand out. You can bold local specialties or ‘chef’s famous’ creations to draw more attention to them. At casual family dining outlets consider using images of items you want to sell more of or box them off as points of attention.

We call these off-set items on a menu eye magnets for a good reason! Don’t overdo it though, the more eye magnets you create the less impact each of them has. One study showed that a menu page with a single image (instead of multiple images or no images) increased the sales of that item by 30%.

5. Research has shown that it’s easier for your eyes to focus on the right side of something, so use this prime space of your menu to its upmost!

6. When listing items people tend to spend the most time examining the first and the last items on a list (it’s the same theory used in art galleries and is applicable to not just your menu design but decorating your restaurant walls – people will remember the first and the last things they see and these two things will form the lasting impression of the whole), so put dishes you want to draw extra attention to in these positions.

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