The restaurant industry has specific crunch periods when demand spikes, orders pile up, and everyone is running some kind of special. Whether it’s Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, EOFY, or summer trade, those busy stretches are when your year’s profit is made or lost.

Promotions go a long way in bringing in customers and driving spend. But too often they cause chaos, confusion, and shrinking margins. 

What Goes Wrong With Restaurant Promotions

Some of the most common concerns and challenges that hospitality operators struggle with while trying to effectively run promotions include:

• Teams not being able to keep up with what offer applies when, causing errors and slower service

• Customers seeing mixed messages across in-store, delivery, or online menus or being unable to avail an offer

• Offers stacking, rules overlapping, or promos running longer than intended, causing revenue leaks

Read on for tips that will help you better plan and structure your promotions whether they are seasonal or just aligned with your strategy. And learn how to easily design and automate these promotions using Abacus POS across dine-in, takeaway, and online.

Start with the right goals for your restaurant promotions

Before you create your next promotional offer, decide what you want to achieve:

• Want to attract new customers? Run a limited-time coupon or referral offer.

• Looking to boost average spend? Build meal deals and bundles with high-margin items.

• Smoothen flow during slow hours? Schedule time-based special prices that activate automatically.

• Encourage group orders or catering? Offer early-bird incentives or set menus for pre-booked events.

Once your goal is clear, you can use Liven Abacus - Australia’s leading Hospo POS platform - to do the heavy lifting.

Automate restaurant promotions with Liven

Whether you’re running a campaign to boost average spend, fill slow hours or drive return visits, Abacus along with Liven Loyalty gives you all the tools you need to plan, execute, and track your restaurant promotion strategy.

Set up offers directly in Abacus POS

Abacus makes it simple to create and sync promotions across multiple venues, online ordering, and POS devices, with no manual intervention required from your team once configured. 

Use these core promotion tools to drive timely, targeted offers:

• Combos: Create a pre-set group of products at a special rate. You can add this combo as a distinct product on your POS menu for easy use.

• Price Triggers: Automatically activate offers based on time, product, product category, spend or type of customers. Works great for ‘Buy 1, Get 1’ or Happy Hour type of offers.

  

• Coupons: Apply a pre-set discount by scanning a QR code, entering a code for online orders or pressing a button on the POS. You can set redemption limits that will automatically turn off coupons after the limit is breached.

• Multipricing: Set up different prices for the same product based on the POS location, specific time period, customer type or sales channel. These will be automatically applied based on the rules you’ve set.

💡See more examples of restaurant promotions and learn how to set up combos, coupons, triggered discounts, and multipricing in Abacus

Access tools that lock in spend and loyalty

In addition, Liven gives you access to two powerful value tools that are designed to drive spend, loyalty, and repeat visits. These go beyond traditional promotions by influencing customer behaviour before and after the transaction, not just at the point of sale.

Here is an overview of how, together, these tools support a complete restaurant promotions strategy that drives both immediate and long-term results.

Plan ahead with a simple promotion calendar

Promotions work best when they’re planned in advance and aligned with your venue’s key dates, like holidays, events, or seasonal peaks. 

Here is an example based on what works for some of our best operators. You can use the same rhythm, adjusting for your own peak periods like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, EOFY or custom events.

Promote Your Offers Across Every Channel

Even great offers fail if no one knows about them. Promote your deals where customers already engage:

• Add banners to online menus and order screens

• Send short, visual email or SMS campaigns

• Use in-venue QR codes linking directly to current specials

• Keep pricing and messaging consistent across every channel

💡For more tips on improving the visibility of your restaurant marketing and promotions, check out our piece on Integrated Technology for Restaurant Marketing.

Track Promotion Performance

Abacus automatically tracks redemptions, triggers, and sales so you can see what’s working and change what’s not. With real-time data, you can adjust live, not after the rush is over.

Other than the regular sales reports, here are some reporting tools built specifically for you to understand how your promos are performing.

• Coupon Reports show which codes are redeemed, by whom, and how much they saved. Ideal for tracking discounts, and promo uptake.

  

• Price Trigger Reports tell you how often automated triggers are firing and their total financial impact. If a trigger isn’t activating, it could signal a pricing mismatch or low bundle uptake.

  

• Sales & Product Mix Reports help identify which combos or set menus lift AOV (average order value)

• Brandollar & Rewardollar performance: You can easily view reports on how your Brandollars or Rewardollars are performing through customer cohort and other reports on Liven Insights.

Ready to make your restaurant promotions work harder?

With Liven, you can plan, automate, and measure promotions that increase sales, protect margins, and keep your team focused on service, not spreadsheets.

Whether it’s Christmas, Valentine’s, EOFY, or summer crowds, our team can help you activate smarter promotions with Abacus POS and Liven. Click here to set up a call with us.