How Much Commission Should You Pay for Referrals to Your Restaurant?

There are many different options available to do this, and what it will also come down to is, determining what type of incentive by way of commission percentage that you want to offer.
 
Employee commissions
What you can do here is for every client referral to your restaurant by one of your employees, you can offer them a percent of what the initial meal cost for the first time visit from the referred clients. If you are going to do this as a one time commission then you need to make sure that it is a reasonable amount in order to encourage the employees to take part in this.  

Then another way of doing this is to set a count of how many referrals they make. For example if they make five in a month set a certain percent of their wages. Perhaps five percent would be acceptable by both you and the employee. If there is an increased amount of referrals then bump up both the number of referrals and the commission rate.  

You will find that if you make this lucrative enough you will actually get a great deal of referrals from your own employees. It doesn’t matter how small your restaurant establishment is, these types of referrals are very important. Most often employees are excellent at bringing in referrals because they have first hand knowledge of the business that they are promoting.  
 
Customer commissions
You could also offer commission incentives to regular clients who bring in new customers. What you may want to do in a case like this is issue coupons for them to hand out to their referrals. When new clients come in to the restaurants with the coupon it will have the referrer's name on it, and you can give them a certain commission off there next meal for example.
 
One of the reasons that commission referral campaigns fail is because the owners running these campaigns don’t want to pay a good enough commission. It must be remembered that if you run a good service in your restaurant then after a client has visited once they are sure to come back. This is alone is repeat business and is well worth a good substantial commission.  

The size of your establishment really dictates as to what kind of commission you can afford to pay. It can be anywhere from 5%, 10% up to 50% depending on what the criteria the commission is going to be based on. Meaning if it is going to be a meal then 50% would not be out of order. If it is going to be a percent of the employee's wages then 50% would be a hefty amount to offer.

Article source: Contributed by RestaurantNewsResource.com, a global restaurant news distribution service.


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