How to Get More Customers in a Restaurant: 16 Proven Ways

To get more customers in your restaurant, work in this order: make yourself findable (Google Business Profile, fresh reviews above 4.5 stars), make yourself easy to buy from (a website with online ordering), then give first-timers a reason to come back (a loyalty program and your own customer list).

Skipping straight to promotions is the most common and most expensive mistake.

Most restaurants don't have a marketing problem — they have a discovery problem. In 2025, 60% of US operators reported softer customer traffic, according to the National Restaurant Association. The 16 tactics below follow that sequence: visibility, conversion, repeat business.

Where new customers actually come from

Before picking a tactic, know where a first-time customer actually looks.

No single channel carries you any more — the average consumer checks six sources. All of them point back to the same two places: your listing and your website.

Running a specific kind of venue? These go deeper: pizza marketing ideas, coffee shop marketing, and food truck marketing.

16 ways to attract restaurant customers

Here they are in the order most restaurants should work through them: the tactics that make you findable come first; the ones that make people come back come last.

1. Create a restaurant website (if you don't have one)

Every other channel eventually sends people here. Three things have to be right: the current menu as text rather than a PDF, today's hours, and a way to order without phoning you. A builder gets you there in an afternoon — here's how to create a restaurant website.

2. Enable online ordering on your website

Ordering on your own site does two things a marketplace listing never will: it keeps the margin and the customer's details.

Guests who order directly put 35% more items into each check than customers ordering through third-party marketplaces, according to the Paytronix Online Ordering Report 2024. A small, one-time incentive on a first direct order is cheaper than a permanent discount, and it moves someone into your own online ordering system database.

3. Build a branded mobile app

An app doesn't win new customers directly. It changes what an existing one is worth.

We tracked the same 72,468 people before and after they installed their restaurant's app, across 1,337 restaurants that launched their own app. The same customer ordered 41% more often after a quarter, 65% more after six months, and 87% more after a year, with average order value up 14%.

At Michelangelo 301 in Florida, 51% of orders now come through the restaurant's own app, on $863,000 of direct sales — built on UpMenu's restaurant mobile app.

4. Use marketplaces like Uber Eats or DoorDash

Marketplaces put you in front of people who would never have found you — worth something when you're new or quiet.

Be aware of high commission rates before committing:

• Uber Eats commissions
• DoorDash fees
• Grubhub fees

5. Offer discounts and promotions

Discounts are the fastest way to fill a table and the fastest way to train people to wait for the next one. The version that works ties the offer to a time you're empty rather than to your whole menu: a happy hour on your two slowest evenings costs margin on covers you weren't getting anyway. More in our promotions guide, linked above.

6. Implement a loyalty program

A loyalty program is usually sold as a retention tool, which undersells what it does. We compared 69 restaurants in the year after launch against their own results the year before: orders rose 16%, revenue 22%, average check 4%.

The surprise was who was collecting the points. Checked by email address, 64% had never ordered from that restaurant before, while the frequency of existing regulars barely moved. So if you want new customers, put the first reward within reach of a first or second order, not the tenth.

7. Claim your Google Business Profile

The highest-return hour of work on this list, and it's free. 71% of consumers use Google when looking up a local business, and a half-filled profile is the most common reason a restaurant loses a customer it never knew it had.

Fill in every field: hours including holidays, the current menu, the ordering link, the delivery area, and photos from the last three months rather than opening week. Full walkthrough: Google Business Profile for restaurants.

TripAdvisor and Yelp still catch travelers and planners. Claim them, keep the details identical to Google, and stop there.

8. Get online reviews

"Get more reviews" is useless advice without a number attached. Customers apply hard cut-offs, and in the last twelve months those cut-offs got stricter:

Twenty is a floor, not a target — below it, almost half your potential first-timers filter you out before reading a word. Collecting reviews is a routine, not a campaign: three months of silence puts you back under the line, even with a perfect rating.

Asking works: 83% of people who were asked left one. Here's how to ask for reviews the right way, including what you're not allowed to offer in exchange.

9. Leverage email marketing on autopilot

Your email list already knows you, which makes it one of the cheapest channels you own — GetResponse puts the food industry's average open rate at 38.52%. Send new menu items, event invitations, and offers people hear about first, capped at roughly one send a week.

10. Take advantage of social media platforms

Social media is where people first see you; your website is where they decide. 44% of Gen Z diners find restaurant deals on social media. Post regularly, reply the same day, and keep your hours and ordering link current in every bio.

11. Get higher in search results with SEO

Restaurant SEO comes down to three things: your menu is real text rather than a PDF, your address and hours match everywhere they appear, and each location has its own page. Everything else is refinement.

Getting found in AI search

In 2026, 45% of consumers used AI tools like ChatGPT for local business recommendations — up from 6% a year earlier — making AI the third most-used source after Google and Facebook (BrightLocal, 1,002 US adults). You can't optimize an assistant the way you optimize a page, but you can control what it reads:

• Keep your facts identical everywhere: When Google and your website disagree on your hours, the model picks the wrong one or skips you.
• Put the answers in text: Include cuisine, price range, dietary options, delivery area, and neighborhood. If it only exists in a photo of your menu, it doesn't exist.
• Keep reviews recent: Old reviews produce an old description of you.

12. Provide excellent customer service

No amount of marketing survives a bad first visit, and a first visit is the only one you're guaranteed. Customers notice two things: consistency, and how you handle it when something goes wrong. A recovered complaint turns into a review far more often than a smooth meal does.

13. Use high-quality photos of your food

45% of US diners have tried a restaurant for the first time because of a post it made itself. That's the whole argument for shooting your own food properly. You don't need a studio — daylight, a clean surface near a window, and a rule that nothing leaves the kitchen looking different from what a customer would get.

14. Offer gift cards

A gift card is the only channel where a customer pays you to introduce you to someone else. Whoever redeems it is almost always a first-timer, and usually spends past the card's value. Sell them through your own ordering system so redemption also puts the recipient into your list.

15. Partner with food influencers

Proximity beats reach. Someone with 4,000 followers who all live twenty minutes away is worth more than someone with 200,000 spread across a country.

Check where the comments come from, not the follower count, and agree in advance on what's posted and when. Learn more with our guide to restaurant influencer marketing.

16. Collaborate with local businesses

The partnerships that work share a customer base but not a menu — a gym, a cinema, a hairdresser, an office block. Offer their customers something small and specific rather than a generic discount, and ask for the same back.

Events work the same way: hosting a supplier's tasting fills a slow night with people who arrive curious.

Build a customer list you own

Every restaurant taking online orders builds an asset that never shows up on the till roll: a list of people who ordered once, some of whom left permission to be contacted. We looked at what your customer list is actually worth across 1,709 restaurants in 18 countries and 13 million orders.

• A typical single-location restaurant has around 2,890 unique customers after three to five years, worth €15,000–73,000 a year.
• A regular (ten or more orders) is worth roughly €420 a year; a one-time customer is worth about €31 — a fourteen-fold difference.
• Only about 7% of a base are regulars. Close to 60% ordered exactly once, and those people already know your food.

That last group is the cheapest source of "new" customers you'll ever have. One message to 950 contactable customers brings in roughly €1,500 at a €16 average basket. None of it works if the data sits with a marketplace — ordering through your own site or app automatically puts the contact into a restaurant CRM.