I own a Houseplant Café, where you can sip coffee while you shop for houseplants and small handmade items, think jewelry, pottery, candles etc. We’ve been open six months and things are going not as well as we’d hoped. Demographic: millennial women, brunch crowd (I can break this down further) Area: 12k cars pass us a day, we do have road signage and a flag Returning customers: 17% of our clients visit more than once a month Offerings: locally roasted coffee, lattes, smoothies, sandwiches, fresh pastries
I have a marketing background, but I’ve been out of the game a bit and so I feel like I’m not living up to the needs of the business. We do post daily on social media. Have a following of over 5k between insta and FB, starting on Tiktok next week. We need to nearly double our daily numbers to get to the profits we estimated before we opened. We do theme days that are very popular but then the rest of the week is under $500 days. I have a small marketing budget of about $1000 a month which I’m not sure where to utilize. Help? I’m getting desperate for my space to succeed.
So, as a business owner who’s got a sales and marketing background too, here’s what I’d do :
Drive thru : Can you do any kind of drive thru service? This is huge at the moment for coffee in Australia at least.
Offers : do you collect customers details and email them offers? Offer them good deals on the slow days.
Loss leader : what % of customers buy the plants etc? Is your coffee underpriced as a loss leader to draw people in to buy the plants? If not, that could be a problem. First coffee per customer should be cheaper than competitors to draw them in.
customer surveys : are you surveying customers for direct feedback? This can really help you understand what’s working and what’s not.