10+ Ways to Make Your Coffee Shop Special

How to Make Your Coffee Shop Special

Ways to Make Your Coffee Shop Special

What makes a coffee shop special?

When you walk into your favorite coffee shop, what's the first thing that jumps out at you? Is it the location, the customer service, the coffee menu options, or “the vibe” that makes your favorite café special?

It may be all of the above.

When you start to plan your coffee shop, the first step is often coming up with a concept that works for your customer base.

Your coffee shop concept provides the basic framework behind the experience your customers will have. From this framework, your business can grow into something truly unique and special.

This “specialness” often translates into deep customer loyalty, word-of-mouth marketing, more sales, and a higher profit margin.

This post will offer some tips on making your coffee shop special and unique for your customers.

Ways to Make Your Coffee Shop Special

 Stick to One Coffee Shop Concept

Being everything to everyone is not often the best business strategy. Instead, stick to one coffee shop business concept and try to ensure that all of the elements of your coffee shop fit together harmoniously.

We believe that your coffee shop concept is not limited to just your design. It is the universal thought that ties all the elements, including your vision, ambiance, branding, and budget, together.

Your concept is an idea that characterizes your coffee business. Very often, it's based on your worldview, experiences, values, and your ultimate vision.

Unlike quantifiable business planning and crunching the numbers, your cafe concept starts as a very personal and creative endeavor.

Often, your cafe business dream starts from a specific vision or a spark that you have on your mind.

In the process of your coffee shop business planning, you will be polishing your concept to fit your financial reality, neighboring competition, available space, and other fundamental factors that can buttress up against your concept.

You will easily find several different ways to make your coffee shop special for your customers. But having several different themes will often collide with each other. This is what you want to avoid.

Create an Emotional Connection

Your coffee shop concept centers on the type of experience you want your customers to have. For example, you may have an idea to serve fresh baked goods, soups, or smoothies. You may want to have live music and serve alcohol at your coffee shop in the evenings. All of these focus on the experience your customers will get when they walk through your doors.

Your concept also facilitates the emotional connection that you want your customers to retain. Your brand also affirms this experience. Things like your coffee shop's name, logo, use of colors, ambiance, service, uniforms, and signage – all play into supporting this emotional connection you want to develop with your customers.

Creating an emotional connection means paying attention to the details. Little things like cups and saucers, napkins, artwork, seating, and interior design and colors should encompass the overall idea. The same applies to the food or desserts you serve. 

Offer Exceptional Customer Service

 It's no secret that excellent customer service is essential for making your coffee shop special.

The cornerstone of excellent customer service is making each customer who walks through your door feel valued and unique. This can be hard to do if you have a busy café, so training your baristas and staff will be necessary. You will need to set an example every day of what service you want your customers to experience.

Every customer will experience “touchpoints” with you and your staff. That is, they will interact with your staff – whether it's by ordering their coffee, paying for their food, or saying goodbye. You need to take advantage of each of these touchpoints.

Your customer service will endear to your customers. Excellent customer service begets more customer sales. It starts from the top. Training and inner culture impact your customer service.

Ensure Your Customers' Daily Escape

Whether on a work break or just trying to find a place to relax, each customer is looking for a mini-escape from their workday or life. Your coffee shop can be the space for your customers to take a break from their busy, hectic, and noisy days.

Your job is to guarantee their mini-escape. Often, this means delivering quality coffee they can't brew at home, offering unique foods and pastries, and making them feel valued.

Even if they visit for just a few minutes, customers yearn for a positive experience and a place to find refuge for their day. If you provide this escape every time, you're almost guaranteed a loyal customer and repeat business.

Build a Unique Coffee Shop Menu

What you offer your coffee shop menu is an integral part of your coffee shop experience and your customer's reason for being there. Your menu should entirely reflect the business concept you wish to achieve. This may be challenging because you will have to consider your customers' needs that you don't fully understand yet.

As you do more research and planning – and as you listen to your early customers – you will begin to understand who your customers are and what they want.

Maybe they want additional savory items on your menu like soup and sandwiches. Perhaps they would like to drink wine or beer in the afternoons and evenings.

The development of your coffee shop menu will be ongoing. As you listen to your customers and experiment with new items, it's fair that your menu may look different a few years from now.

Be Inclusive

Work hard to create an atmosphere that is welcoming to every person and background. Your coffee shop will often be a refuge from the outside world, so work hard to offer your “space” as a safe place for people to meet, enjoy coffee, and spend time.

Staff members should also follow the inclusive guidelines you set – that allow everyone to feel safe and welcomed. Staff members should be trained with this specific notion: every customer should feel valued and accepted. Additionally, the more inclusive you are, the more business you are likely to generate. 

Train Your Baristas

Hire amazing baristas. They will support your effort to deliver the type of experience you are looking for. Creating an excellent experience for your customers doesn't often come spontaneously. Consistently good experiences come from a vision and barista training and staff training to support that vision.

It starts with hiring the right baristas. Next comes training. Training your baristas to serve fantastic coffee consistently and offer excellent customer service will make your business shine. Barista training will not only improve your customers' experience but often lead to improved sales, customer loyalty, and improved online reviews of your coffee shop.

Offer Live Music

 Live music always creates a unique ambiance that customers enjoy. Live music attracts customers and can easily set you apart from your competition or large corporate chains. The great thing about live music is that it can work in outdoor or indoor settings. 

Put the call out that you are seeking musicians to play at your coffee shop. The chances are that you will find excellent local musicians your coffee shop customers will like.

The great thing about local musicians is that they will also promote your coffee shop too. Their supporters and fans will drop as new customers. If you decide to offer live music, be sure to check with local zoning laws for certain noise ordinances. 

Offer Outdoor Seating

Who doesn't love sitting outside on a beautiful day?

Depending on the weather, outdoor seating can provide a unique atmosphere that customers love. Depending on your setup, you will have the opportunity to create a unique outdoor space for your customers to enjoy their coffee.

If you have space, consider putting up chairs, tables, umbrellas, or even go big with a gazebo or trellis covering.  

Outdoor spaces have proven to be helpful during the pandemic as businesses slowly reopen. If you don't have outdoor space, you can still petition your city to utilize the space directly outside your coffee shop's doors or onto the grass median that many neighborhood coffee shops have.

Open Your Coffee Shop to Neighborhood Groups

Invite neighborhood groups to hold their weekly meetings. This may be your local book club, knitting group, or parent's group. Groups can bring in lots of additional sales receipts per week – adding up to quite a bit of coffee shop sales for the year!

Additionally, relationships with local groups and clubs can also build customer loyalty from individual patrons throughout the week.

Approach local groups and offer your space on slower nights of the week. Perhaps you can give a small percentage discount for their members to encourage sales.

Inviting groups to utilize your coffee shop allows you the opportunity to become an indispensable community partner – and an exceptional neighbor! Additionally, these groups and individuals will be effective at promoting your coffee shop. 

Invest in décor

Your art, style, furniture, and light fixtures are important to your décor, allowing you to create a unique ambiance or atmosphere.

Your décor can have the ability to set your coffee shop apart from other businesses and provide a unique and memorable experience for your customers.

This may include offering comfortable seating and unique tables and chairs. The more comfortable your seating is, the longer your customers will stick around. Take advantage of any unique space and design in the building that may allow you to deliver a memorable experience to your customers. Large windows, outdoor seating areas, lighting, and facades can all play a big role in the uniqueness you offer.

Host Tastings

As a coffee shop, you have the opportunity to share a variety of coffee from around the world. Use your cafe to educate your customers on your choice of roasting profiles.

Host coffee tastings and offer customers the unique opportunity to try different roasts from various origins.

Hosting cuppings can endear you to your customers and elevate your reputation as a specialty coffee shop. In addition to your coffee tastings, you may consider offering some sample pastries, smoothies, or other menu items too.

Open Your Coffee Shop to Local Artists

Coffee and art go together like cake and ice cream.

Decorate your space with art or photography pieces (if this fits your vision) or any other items that fall into your concept. Local artists would love the opportunity to share their work.

Some coffee shops offer their space to local artists and often work out an agreement to sell their art for a small commission fee. This type of arrangement can be a big win-win situation for everyone. You can offer your customers exciting art by local artists. You can support artists and their work, as well as generate an additional revenue stream.

Don't Forget the Basics

While providing something extraordinary is always great, providing the basics will also prove to go a long way.

This means maintaining cleanliness, having comfortable and maybe even custom-made furniture, a convenient layout, or clean restrooms. Offering a space that is accessible for people with disabilities is not only the law, but it's smart for business.

Providing good exterior lighting, safe parking, and clean entrance ways can make your coffee shop more appealing and likelier to visit.

Highlight Your Coffee Shop Specialness

Be Consistent

One of the reasons customers love Starbucks and McDonald’s is that they offer consistent menu items. It doesn't matter if you are in Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, or London, you know what you will get when you order a tall Americano or Big Mac.

In the same manner, allow your customers to know that they are going to get:

• Excellent beverages
• Memorable customer service
• Clean restrooms
• Cozy atmosphere

Training yourself and your staff (baristas) will help you be consistently good at providing the things your customers want and expect.

Promote Your Specialness

You will need to promote your business. Promote your business in a way that highlights your uniqueness. Post stuff on social media, write a blog post, and approach local media.

There are many great and affordable ways to promote your coffee business. As you know, one of the best ways is to let your loyal customers do the work and help spread the good word about you. This is where your consistently excellent customer service and great coffee do the real work of promoting your business.

Nevertheless, utilize the tools you have. Update your coffee shop website and perhaps assign your baristas to help with your social media accounts.

You can have unconventional promotional campaigns by email or text from information collected through your coffee shop POS system and social media.

Ways to Make Your Cafe Unique

We've listed items to make your business memorable. Remember that your customers should be the primary focus when delivering the best experience, service, and product. Pick an element that stands out and determine what you can do to improve on it for your particular business. 

We will list the items that can make each coffee shop memorable below:

• Stick to One Concept
• Create an Emotional Connection
• Offer Exceptional Customer Service
• Ensure Your Customers' Daily Escape
• Be Inclusive
• Train Your Baristas
• Offer Live Music
• Offer Outdoor Seating
• Open Your Space to Neighborhood Groups
• Invest in Decor
• Host Cuppings & Tastings
• Open Your Space to Local Artists
• Don't Forget the Basics

Related Questions:

How can I make my coffee shop special if I am on a budget?

Creating a special place for your customers doesn't necessarily require a large budget. You'd be surprised what you can do with a minimal coffee shop budget and plan.

Consider any of the items listed above. Many of them depend on creating and maintaining the intention to giving your customers the very best experience.

Whether it's your food, customer service, or your ambiance, there are a variety of ways to make your coffee shop special.

Consider picking any element of your coffee shop and then asking yourself (and your staff), “How can I (we) make this better?” Spending money may not be the first thing you need to do. Often retraining, or thinking outside the box is all it takes to make things extra special.

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