It is very vital to get customer data to boost your restaurant sales with data-driven marketing. Understanding a customer’s journey as they learn about your organization, develop an affection for your products and services, and eventually become an advocate for your brand is an important part of expanding your business.
The process isn’t easy, but once you grasp the customer’s perspective, you’ll be able to guide them through the many stages of the journey.
The customer life cycle boils down to this. You carry out marketing operations that move customers through the stages of the customer life cycle. This allows you to expand your company.
One of the key problems that arise when talking about data-driven marketing is, “Where do you get your consumer data and how do you collect it in order to analyze and use it afterward?”
The answer is simple; it is just a matter of understanding marketing to see how you can turn small platforms into data-producing machines.
Here in this article, we’ve gone over the foundation of how and where you may get customer data to boost your restaurant sales with Data-Driven Marketing in each buyer stage of the A2A funnel.
Get Customer Data To Boost Your Restaurant Sales With Data-Driven Marketing at Different Stages-
The Awareness Stage
Organic and paid social media–
One of the most effective ways to raise awareness and collect customer data is through social media. People spend an average of 1.4 hours every day on social media sites, sharing their thoughts and questions and conversing with others.
This is the time to make a good first impression and position yourself as a thought leader in your field. The quantity and quality of leads you generate at this level are determined by your actions. At this point, the aim is to expose your brand to the customer by posting material that catches their attention. The benefit of incorporating social media into your marketing strategy is that it allows you to reach a much larger audience without requiring significant marketing spend and in turn Get Customer Data To Boost Your Restaurant Sales With Data-Driven Marketing.
The Engagement Stage-
Specials and contact page on your website
Create a contact page on your website and invite people to sign up for your restaurant’s specials. It’s a really straightforward method of obtaining client information.
You may also run Facebook and Instagram advertisements and give a CTA for the same when your aim is to collect customer data.
Social Media
Determine the variants of posts that drew the most attention and write content that engages your customers and distinguishes your product while answering the question of why they should buy from you.
It would benefit you to also plan activities such as live Q&As, webinars, tournaments, or live events, as well as host contests or giveaways.
Spend some time responding to reviews, comments, and mentions of your brand. These activities with help you get customer data to boost your restaurant sales with data-driven marketing.
Chatbots
Chatbots are an excellent method to connect with your visitors, interact with them in real-time, solve their queries, make the ordering process seamless, and send promotional offers directly to your consumers’ inboxes. They deliver an interactive experience that is completely automated. When you communicate with a chatbot, it’s as if you’re conversing with a real person.
According to Statista, 11% of the world’s population uses Facebook Messenger every month. Facebook Messenger and other live chat services can gather a wealth of information about each individual customer.
The Acquisition Stage-
POS systems
You have complete control over your POS systems. You’ll be able to manage your delivery and takeaway orders while simultaneously collecting and tracking all of the information your customers give you. This provides you, as a restaurant owner, to categorize them, ranging from the casual user to committed customers. You may contact your consumers directly, send them excellent offers, retarget them, and fully automate the process—your restaurant, your customers—using the power of data and information. From beginning to end, the service is completely branded.
Integrated feedback software
At mkonnekt, we have developed a software calledKritiq, which is incorporated into our online ordering platform Foodkonnekt and sends a feedback email with each order. This allows you to learn extensive information about your customers’ experiences and how you can use it to vastly improve your strategies.
You can do something similar by sending out feedback email campaigns and online surveys and getting a hold of your customer experiences.
The Loyalty Stage-
Loyalty Clubs And Birthday Programs
On multiple media platforms, ensure that you promote your birthday clubs and loyalty programs. These are some of the most effective methods for gathering vital client information. You may give your consumers personalized weekly deals, birthday specials, and many more freebies using these platforms. When a customer joins your program, it’s a sure sign that they’ve reached the loyalty stage of the marketing funnel!
The Advocacy Stage-
The ultimate goal of your marketing funnel should be to convert loyal consumers into proactive advocates for your company. People are more likely to trust a brand that their friends and family recommend over any other form of advertising. Referral programs are an extremely beneficial method to transform your most loyal customers into brand advocates and collect customer data as well. Essentially, they function the same way targeted promotions do, attracting customers who have brimming interest in your restaurant’s products.
Wrap up-
Getting customer data at every part of the marketing funnel is essential to a restaurant’s sales and performance. Learning how to incorporate this data in our technologically reliant society is a must to ensure success.
Here in this article, we have come up with 7 strategies to boost your restaurant sales with data-driven marketing. Data is no longer an option; it is a requirement. Data is used in almost every industry, and the restaurant industry is no exception. The days of restaurant proprietors seeing this as a day-to-day business are long gone.
Considering sales based on the number of feet that landed today, with no notion if they will return. Gone are the days when we couldn’t predict restaurant sales and had to rely on what we sold at the time. Gone are the days when we didn’t know how much inventory we’d need in the future and had to rely on how much we utilized today.
GONE ARE THOSE DAYS.
Enter- Data.
Consider this- Organizations that are data-driven are 23 times more likely to acquire than their less agile counterparts. That means data is something, right?
Let’s be clear: only those restaurants will survive who are able to collect and, more crucially, exploit critical consumer data.
After you’ve gathered vital customer information, it’s time to devise strategies to boost your restaurant sales with data-driven marketing- with this information.
1. Understand And Segment Your Audience
With so much data at your disposal, you can figure out the characteristics of a typical restaurant patron and learn about their background, style, and personal preferences, among other things. Interaction with your visitors on social media, online ordering habits, phone conversations, and customer feedback, among other things, provides you with a lot of data on client behavior.
Begin segmenting your audience and developing marketing initiatives that will specifically target them which will, in turn, help you to devise strategies to boost your restaurant sales with data-driven marketing.
For example, if you notice a customer who does not order tacos on Tuesday, send them an email or a text message reminding them that you have a taco Tuesday at your establishment. Alternatively, if a customer never gets wings with their pizzas, inform them that you have a lunch special where they may have pizzas, wings, and a beverage for a cheap price.
Inventory management is a critical component of every restaurant, and it becomes increasingly difficult to manage without effective tracking and reporting.
You can better adapt your ordering cycles and ensure you have the proper amount of inventory at the right time by using data to better understand cooking and ordering behaviors. You really don’t want to overstock and run out of stock because either can cost you a lot of money.
Are you aware that attracting a new customer costs five times as much as keeping an existing one? As a result, rather than chasing after newer clients, concentrate on your existing customers. It’s all about customer loyalty in the restaurant industry! Loyalty is one of the most important strategies to boost your restaurant sales with data-driven marketing.
You need to know how much you’re paying your employees. When you combine sales data from your POS with scheduling software, you can determine when you have too many cooks in the kitchen. However, delving a bit deeper can reveal missed profits. Are your tables turning too slowly because you’re short-staffed during a particularly busy time of the week? As a result, you should make use of the platform to objectively monitor employee performance and determine who is meeting your professional expectations.
5. Menu Management
It’s not always the case that the most popular dish is also the most profitable. There may be times when a large number of customers order a particular item on your menu, but none of them return for more. Big data may help you find the worst and best products on your menu, as well as dishes that need to be promoted or discounted on a regular basis. Aside from that, you can compare visitors’ preferences based on time of day or week to create a highly tailored menu.
6. Improve Upon Guest Experience
It’s a lot easier to improve the visitor experience when you have a lot of data about your customers at hand. When visitors enter a restaurant, they are anticipating more than just the food; they are anticipating the entire experience in order to return. As a result, depending on your experiences with and research into your clients, strive to give the finest experience possible.
7. Sales Forecasting
When you keep a constant watch on your audience (through social media, feedback mechanisms, etc. ), which is the essence of marketing, you learn about what’s new in the marketing world. That is to say, eating habits, what’s “in” these days, and so on. This aids in the forecasting of sales. Using big data to forecast business will assist you with all aspects of organization and planning, ensuring that no unpleasant surprises arise.
Wrap up-
Finding strategies to boost your restaurant sales with data-driven marketing can be challenging, but having the right facts and stats to help you along the way can make it a lot easier. Tracking and utilizing these crucial data points will help you better adjust and prepare, giving you more control over your strategic growth.
With social media getting used as a great device in enterprises to grow, it’s been more and more vital to track the effects of your social media ROI, ie, your social media efforts.
The most pressing question now is how to comprehend the consequences of your social media strategy. Are you on the right track when it comes to your content strategy? Return on investment, or ROI, is the solution. It is nothing more than the returns a company would expect from the time, resources, and minds invested in the company’s entire social media strategy.
In terms of math, it boils down to–> Revenue-Costs/Costs*100.
Now imagine you were running a grocery store and you purchased the groceries for $100 and sold them for $150, then you’d get: 150-100/100*100= 50% by plugging these numbers into the formula.
Isn’t it easy enough? But, in terms of social media marketing, how do you apply this concept?
The return on investment (ROI) on your social media campaign is the amount of money you’ve made. But not all social media efforts are directly attributable to monetary benefits. As a result, all marketers must be able to extract and apply relevant data, as and when required.
Why is it important to measure Social Media ROI?
It’s crazy how many marketers have no idea what kind of ROI they’re getting from which channel or how their social media practices are impacting their enterprise. Since every step, every effort you put into your business has repercussions, this underestimation of social media can cause havoc for your business. As a result, it’s past time for you to start treating your social media sites with the respect they deserve.
If you’ve figured out which social media activities are yielding the best results, you can start planning strategies in that direction. For example, you will discover that posting stories on Instagram or running competitions on Facebook generates more momentum on specific days, resulting in increased monetary benefits to your company; as a result, you’ll know what you need to do in the future. That’s the power of studying ROI.
How to measure social media ROI?
Step-1
Identify your goals:
Always determine the goals you want to achieve from your activities before calculating returns or even thinking about analyzing the consequences of your social media efforts. Do you want to increase your following? Do you want more people to sign up for your newsletter? Do you want to increase your sales? Following that, you should consider calculating the social media ROI.
Step-2
Understanding marketing funnel:
After you’ve figured out your marketing objectives, you should move on to understanding your marketing funnel. Understanding how social media metrics connect to the customer journey is a crucial first step.
Engagement with the consumer, which translates to reach in social media terms, is the first step in the customer journey, as it is in the early phases.
Similarly, whilelearning about your audience in the middle stage, it translates to CPC, or cost per click, and CTR, or click-through rate. Finally, at the last stage, encouraging your audience to purchase equates to conversions like sales, subscriptions, downloads, etc.
Step-3:
Calculate!
Now that you have targeted your KPIs and understood what to calculate, now comes the tricky part, calculating them.
In order to determine your ROI, you’ll need the correct tools. Many built-in technologies, such as Facebook insights, Instagram insights, and LinkedIn insights, provide granular information on how people interact with your material.
With these, you can keep track of all of your engagement. You can observe when your audience is active, where they are from, what demographics they have, so on and so forth. You can check how your audience reacted to your ad using Facebook Ads Manager.
Another significant tool is Google Analytics. To find out how much traffic and conversions your social media marketing efforts are producing, add Google Analytics UTM parameters to the URL of your social media ads.
Why is measuring social media ROI difficult?
Due to a variety of factors, social media managers and executives are finding it increasingly challenging to measure social media marketing ROI. Executives are unsure about what to measure. Many people believe that if their content gets a lot of likes and shares, their strategy is good enough; however, this is not always the case. We need to see if our efforts are yielding any quantitative results.
Is your product being purchased? Is the quality of your online orders improving? Is your eBook gaining popularity? Always measure all the relevant KPIs and do analysis accordingly.
Wrap up:
Social media marketing ROI is a parameter that should never be overlooked, if you are putting in genuine efforts in it, and want good results out of it, keep measuring and keep analyzing!
Competition in the restaurant industry can be cut-throat and with the rapidly changing trends, it can be difficult to acquire new customers or retain existing. As more customers seek out the ease of take-out–and especially delivery, third-party for delivery services provide an easy way to increase restaurant sales with online ordering.
Although these delivery services offer an opportunity to reach new customers and increase sales, the benefits come at a cost: giving up access to valuable customer data and losing loyal customer base to the delivery partners.
It, therefore, becomes pertinent for restaurants to explore strategies to engage with their customers to keep the regulars coming back, attract new customers, and build their native platforms to increase online orders on their website. In this article, we will discuss some strategies to increase restaurant sales with online ordering.
How to increase restaurant sales with online ordering?
Opt for A Robust Online Ordering Solution
Streamline your online ordering menu
Optimize your online ordering platform
Make it easy to order from your website
Leverage Digital channels to Promote Online Ordering
Optimize Your Website For Local Search
Promote your Online Ordering Platform
1. Opt For A Robust Online Ordering Solution
Many restaurant owners/managers opt for third party delivery services to provide the convenience of online ordering to their customers. The general belief is that it is easier to get started on such platforms and get more orders without any investment in terms of time and resources. However, what they fail to factor in is that the additional revenues generated by orders received via these platforms is usually diluted by the hefty commissions charged by them.
At this point, it is advisable to consider the long-term benefits of building your own online ordering platform. Initially, you may have to put in some efforts to promote your online ordering platform but these are resources invested in building your brand that have the potential to deliver huge dividends in the future.
There are several robust online ordering solutions in the market, which are commission-free and are available to restaurants totally free of cost. There are a few things you should keep in mind while selecting an online ordering solution:
What are the key features of an online ordering solution?
Simple configuration: Most modern solutions are easy to setup and configure and allow to start taking online orders within 24 hours.
POS integrations: An integrated online ordering solution does away with the need for manually updating orders. Your online orders appear on your POS along with other orders, and all menu updates on the POS are automatically reflected on your online ordering platform.
Customer data: if your online ordering solution is integrated with your pos, the customer data from online orders appears with all other data on your POS.
Customizable: You should be able to customize the platform, upload pictures and add descriptions to align with your brand identity.
Customers should be able save their preferences and customize their orders easily.
Accept Multiple Payment Options
Integrated feedback and loyalty program help you to build a loyal customer base.
2. Streamline your online ordering menu
Chipotle Online Ordering
A lot of thought should go into creating your online ordering menu. Some items that may be very popular in-store might not lot lend themselves to pick-up or delivery. Evaluate each menu item on the following three criteria to come up with the ideal menu.
Whether they do or do not travel well
Whether the margin on the food item is enough to cover packaging/delivery costs.
Packaging considerations
Your online order menu should include only those items that travel well and at the same time have a high popularity and profitability score.
3. Optimize Your Online Ordering Platform
The online ordering platform is an extension of your brand, and you should take utmost care to build the same customer experience on your online ordering page that customers have come to expect from your brand.
Customize every aspect of the solution to align with your brand identity.
Upload good quality food images and detailed descriptions of food items.
Arrange menu items like they would appear on your in-store menu.
Create up-sell or cross-sell opportunities by creating pop-ups for popular items or items that are usually ordered together.
Streamline and smoothen the customer journey on your online ordering platform by setting up automations such as helpful tips and suggestions or allowing customers to save orders or delivery address etc.
4. Make It Easy To Order Right From Your Website
In most case, customers land on your online ordering platform from your website. The order online button should appear prominently on the top of your home page and menu page to grab the customers attention. Highlight your specials and consider adding add to cart buttons to menu items.
5. Leverage Digital Channels to Promote Online Ordering
You should build a strong online identity by adding the order online button to all your social media handles including Facebook, Instagram and GMB page. Platforms like Yelp and Tripadvisor also allow you to build your restaurant page and add an order online button to lead customers to your order online platform.
6. Optimize Your Restaurant Website for Local Search
Each day thousands of customers are searching on Google for restaurant like yours using keywords or terms related to your business/menu. You should optimize your website for these key search terms. Research keywords for your restaurant and include them in your page’s body, header, title tags, and Meta description and your sit’s SEO.
Build your website’s credibility and trust with the search engines by adding your restaurant to relevant local listings including Google maps, Apple maps, Yellow book, Map quest and Nextdoor.
7. Promote Your Online Ordering Platform
You would want your customers to know that you are accepting online orders. Promoting your online ordering platform through organic and paid channels can help your reach more customers and increase restaurant sales with online ordering.
In-Store Promotions
Promote your online ordering link via window displays and posters in prominent places such as the check out counter.
Grab the attention of your customers when they are waiting for their food to arrive with table tents.
Menu inserts are also a great way to reach your customers.
Ensure that your online ordering link is prominently printed on your takeout packages and receipts.
Train your staff to promote your online ordering platform to your customers.
Online Promotions
Social Media platforms can be a great tool to reach your customers. Besides regular posts promoting your online ordering link, you should also consider advertising to reach your target audience on these networks.
You could create a special offer or discount to promote online ordering among your customers.
Run contests to promote online Orders.
Run Ads to promote online ordering
8. Leverage Data To Build Loyalty
Use data from your online ordering solution to create targeted promotions fostering brand loyalty. Segment customers based on their purchase history, preferences and visit frequency and come up with customized offers to bring back customers. For instance;
Offers to bring back dormant customers
Offer on kids meal to bring back customers with kids
Deals to increase average order value of regulars
Flash offers to increase online orders on slow days
Offer available only on online orders to incentivize customers to place pickup orders during rush hours.
Streamlining the customer experience on your online ordering platform and targeted promotions can help you build your brand and increase restaurant sales with online ordering.
Increase Your Restaurant Revenues with FoodKonnekt Online Ordering
Outstanding customer experience is the basis of any successful restaurant. It’s what sets you apart from the plethora of competitors and drives loyalty with your customers. In the digital age, knowing how to create a powerful brand online is as important as the in-store experience. Online presence not only strengthens your brand identity but also helps you reach a larger audience.
In this article, we’re going to show you how to create a powerful brand online by delivering seamless customer experience.
How do you attract customers to your restaurant?
1. Use Social Media to share pictures of your food and restaurant 2. Mobile Optimized and SEO Friendly website 3. Use Email Marketing to Reach More Customers 4. Run a restaurant Birthday Club 5. Partner with the local community for fundraisers 6. Host Local Events 7. Give Coupons for Local events 8. Run a loyalty Program
How do you create a restaurant brand?
a. Define Your Identity b. Identify your Target Audience c. Give Your Brand a Voice d. Work on your Look and Ambiance e. Ensure that your Online Platforms reflect your brand identify f. Customers service should be a reflection of your brand identify g. Reward Loyalty
Tip 1: Respond To Every Comment and Complaint
For online reviews, the way you answer can affect other users’ experiences because they can read the reviews. So, as you respond, don’t forget that your comments are for more than just one customer. Best practices recommend you respond to every review, both positive and negative, in a timely manner. Online Reputation Management is therefore very important for a restaurant business.
Tip 2: Incorporation of Chat-bots
At the core, restaurants are service businesses — they primarily care about providing the best possible experience for guests who visit their physical stores. Everything else, from their website to their marketing campaigns to their online customer service, is just a method to accomplishing that goal. For this reason, we think that chatbots are perfect for service-based businesses that are so focused on in-person experiences.
By answering questions automatically to real humans only when necessary, chatbots can help restaurants concurrently improve customer service and also save up time for their staff to spend promoting their actual in-restaurant experience. Dive in into these 8 examples How Restaurants Can Effectively Use Chatbots
Tip 3: Emphasize On Customer Reviews
Capitalize on your positive customer reviews.
If a restaurant has great reviews on Google, make sure they show up on the website and all social media handles. Do the same with Google my business reviews.
By highlighting your reviews on your website, you’ll improve the customer experience. Your potential customers want to see social or material proof. They want to know others think highly of your restaurant. Learn more about our product KritiQ to take care of the reputation management requirements for your restaurant business.
Tip 4: Make It Easier To Place An Order
One more thing you can do to enhance the customer experience is making your online menu and shopping cart as easy as possible. A bad online ordering experience does zero for your website’s overall usability. Don’t dissipate your customers’ time by asking for too much information or by asking for too many item confirmations before the ultimate purchase. Discard the pop-ups and don’t incorporate too many additional offers. Have a look at our product Foodkonnekt-our integrated solution that can help you to add an additional revenue source while expanding your customer base.
Wrap Up:
The grounds of any strong and successful restaurant begins with providing exceptional customer service. Whether you are a large chain restaurant or a small business, going above and beyond with your customers is a tactic that will drive repeat customers and thrust your revenue today, as well as in the future.
Providing the ease of online ordering to your customers can help you generate incremental sales for your restaurant and boost profitability. Besides, it can also help you to expand your reach, improve order accuracy, and help you get over the hassles of taking orders over the phone.
However, in a crowded restaurant space, just adopting an online ordering platform for your restaurant may not cut the mark. You have to work constantly to increase your restaurant’s online orders by making the platform more visible and making the online ordering experience smooth for your customers. Here are a few strategies for increasing your restaurant’s online orders. We can categorize these strategies into three groups.
What are the advantages of online ordering for your restaurant?
1. Online Ordering drives revenue: You can reach more customers online. The average order value of online orders is higher than in-store orders 2. Free up your Employees to provide a superior customer experience. Taking orders over the phone interferes with in-store services especially during rush hours and over the weekends. With an online ordering solution, employees do not waste time taking orders over the phone. 3. Improves Order Accuracy: Disturbances while taking orders over the phone, can result in incorrect orders. On an online ordering solution, customers can easily enter the orders to the last detail improving order accuracy. 4. Losing customers: You will no longer lose orders during rush hours/ weekends due to busy phone lines. 5. Provide accurate estimates of pick-up and delivery times.
What features should you be looking for in an Online ordering Solution?
1. Ability to work across different browsers such as Chrome, Safari or Bing. 2. Availability on Mobile Platform 3. Multiple Payment Options including wallets like Apple Wallet and Samsung Pay. 4. PoS integrations
What are benefits of having a native online ordering solution for your restaurant?
1. Full Control Over Customer Experience 2. An extension of your brand identity: You can customize your online ordering platform to align with your brand identity; upload food pictures, add specials and offers, make instant and real-time changes to your menu. 3. Collect Crucial Customer Data to create customized experiences, and personalize your marketing messages and encourage repeat visits. Further by integrating your loyalty program to your online ordering solution, you can ensure that your loyalty customers can redeem their offers and coupons on online orders. 4. Keep Your Profits: By opting for an in-house solution, you can do away with commission charged by third party services on each order. All profits from online orders are your own.
How to increase your revenues with online ordering?
1. Native Online Ordering Platform 2. Optimize User Experience On Your Website and Online Ordering Platform: 3. Optimise your menu 4. Provide Multiple Ways To Order 5. Make it easy to reorder Ensure that your online ordering system has the ability to save previous orders based on the timings, delivery address, and card information. 6. Offer Delivery 7. Promote your online ordering link via window displays and posters in prominent places such as the checkout counter. 8. Grab the attention of your customers when they are waiting for their food to arrive with table tents. 9. Menu inserts are also a great way to reach your customers. 10. Ensure that your online ordering link is prominently printed on your takeout packages and receipts. 11. Train your staff to promote your online ordering platform to your customers. 12. You could create a special offer or discount to promote online ordering among your customers. 13. Online promotions: If you are running any offer exclusively for promoting Online Orders, you must ensure that you are posting about these offers on your networks or running ads to reach a larger audience 14. Run contests to promote online Orders.
Technology Parameters for increasing your Restaurant’s Online Orders
1. Native Online Ordering Platform
Until a few years ago, only large restaurant chains could afford sophisticated software and global data infrastructure for the benefit of their business. However, the breakthroughs in cloud computing have now made these services accessible even to small family-owned restaurants.
There are several different solutions out there from third-party online ordering solution that can be integrated with your POS to the restaurant point of sale systems that have their own integrated restaurant online ordering software.
You can select a platform that meets your requirements. Here are a few things you should consider while building your native online ordering platform.
Ability to work across different browsers: Your online ordering platform should work seamlessly across different browsers such as Chrome, Safari or Bing.
Availability on Mobile Platform: The millennial customers prefer to order food-on-the-go using their mobile phones. So, it becomes important to ensure that your online ordering platform is optimized for mobile screens.
Multiple Payment Options: Your online ordering system must have the ability to accept multiple payment options including wallets like Apple Wallet and Samsung Pay.
PoS integrations With the advent of AI, smart online ordering options would become the norm of the day. POS integrations make it easier to automatically process orders accepted from the Online Ordering platform.
FoodKonnekt Online Ordering is one such solution that is available absolutely free of cost to restaurants. It is integrated with several PoS platforms including Clover, Focus PoS, FoodTronix and can be fully customized to align with your brand identity.
2. Consider a Mobile App for your Restaurant:
With the rapid advances in technology, developing an app for your restaurant is no longer going to burn a hole in your pocket. There are several benefits to having an independent app for your restaurant. An app makes it easier for you to promote offers and deals, or to roll out personalized offers based on customer’s purchase history to boost online-orders. It is also much easier to administer a loyalty program through a dedicated app.
However, regular maintenance and updates of a mobile app require additional resources in terms of time and money. Add to that the concerns associated with acquiring and retaining customers on your app, which may require consistent marketing efforts. So, you should consider the return on investment in the long-run before investing in an app.
Subway App Promotes Online Ordering
Optimize User Experience
Competition in a crowded market space provides customers with a wide array of choices. This has led to increased emphasis on user interface/user experience. A customer would not spend more than 2 minutes on your website/ online ordering platform if he/she does not find it appealing, intuitive and easy to use.
1. Optimize User Experience On Your Website
Wendy’s website is optimized for different devices
The user experience on your website should be seamless across multiple devices. However, you would want to prioritize the mobile part of the user experience as the majority of the traffic comes from there.
Your “Menu” should be easily accessible from the homepage of your website.
The Order Online Button should appear prominently on the header of each page.
Your Menu should feature good quality pictures of menu items with a description and price.
Add to Cart options on the menu can make it easier for customers to save their preferences.
Having a consistent menu across all platforms is another feature that you want to focus on to enhance the customer experience. Integration with POS should ensure that once an item is added on PoS the same should be automatically reflected on the online ordering platform.
The Order Online Button appears prominently on the header of Domino’s Homepage
Domino’s provides the Order Now Button below each menu item to make it easier to place an order
2. Optimize User Experience On Your Online Ordering Platform:
Ensure that your online ordering system has the ability to save previous orders based on the timings, delivery address, and card information.
Pop-up or menu-suggestions are a good way to draw attention to new menu items.
The ability to keep track of the order status enhances user experience. Domino’s, for instance, enables customers to see where their order is in the delivery lifecycle.
3. Provide Multiple Ways To Order
In the digital age, where every other brand is vying for customers’ attention, you would need a broader strategy to stay on the top of your customer’s mind. One way to do this is by offering them the convenience of online ordering via multiple platforms – website, mobile, social media, voice assistants (Alexa, Google home, etc). The use of the latest cloud-based technologies will enable this kind of transition.
Popular Brands like Dominos and Pizza Hut are already using technology to push online orders on various platforms. Take a look at all the ways you can now order a pizza from Domino’s
Text: If you have “Easy Order” set up in your Domino’s app account, you can order a pizza by texting a pizza emoji to DPIZZA (374992)
SmartWatch: If you own an Android Wear or Apple Watch, you can “Easy Order” your pizza from Domino’s. You can also schedule a pizza delivery.
Smart Car: If your Ford vehicle is equipped with the technology, you can order pizza on your way home via the Domino’s app Ford SYNC AppLink.
Twitter: You can also order your Pizza from Domino’s by tweeting #EasyOrder or sending pizza emoji to @Dominos via direct message.
Amazon Prime Now: If you’re using Amazon Prime Now services—you can order pizza from not just major brands but also from participating vendors in your local area.
Amazon Echo: With the Domino’s Skill for the Echo, you can reorder your last order, place an Easy Order, or track your order.
4. Offer Delivery
There is no denying the convenience of having food delivered to your doorstep. Most customers say they prefer to order online from restaurants that offer delivery. Offering delivery services can help you increase your restaurant’s online orders.
However, providing delivery services may not be the easiest thing to do. It involves a significant amount of logistics and can be a drain on resources. A good way to check if the benefits of providing delivery outweigh the costs is to run test cases in your local area for a stipulated time and work out the logistics before going for full-scale delivery service.
Tying up with third-party delivery services can also help you to take care of the delivery aspects. There is a lot of data to support that third-party delivery services can bring incremental sales for restaurants, however, there are costs associated with such services that you must factor in to adjudge the real value they bring to your business.
Once you have made the decision to go ahead with delivery, you should ensure that provide a great experience to keep your customers coming back.
Chipotle Promotes Delivery Services on its Website
Your delivery menus should ideally have only those food items that deliver well.
Food Packaging: You would want to ensure that food is packaged in proper containers so that it does not spill and get messed in the containers.
Invest in insulated food bags that keep hot items warm and cool items cool.
Ensure that you include add-ons such as sauces, dips, seasoning, paper napkins, and bio-degradable cutlery.
You could consider apps that help you to assign the delivery orders to your riders based on their availability and location. These apps can also help you track the location of the delivery person and the average time is taken to deliver an order.
Right Marketing to Increase Your Restaurant’s Online Orders
Promoting your online ordering platform consistently can help you reach more customers to increase your restaurant’s online orders.
In-Store Messaging:
In-store promotions should be a major part of your strategy to reach your regular customers and make them aware that they can order from your restaurant from the convenience of their homes.
Pizza Hut Promotes Online Ordering through Offers
Promote your online ordering link via window displays and posters in prominent places such as the check out counter.
Grab the attention of your customers when they are waiting for their food to arrive with table tents.
Menu inserts are also a great way to reach your customers.
Ensure that your online ordering link is prominently printed on your takeout packages and receipts.
Train your staff to promote your online ordering platform to your customers.
You could create a special offer or discount to promote online ordering among your customers.
If you don’t already have one, you should consider launching a loyalty program to promote your online ordering platform. Regular customers are your restaurant brand ambassadors and account for a major part of your sales. Loyalty programs are an easy way to keep these customers returning to your restaurant and build a loyal customer base. They are also an ideal target to promote your online ordering platform.
Pizza Hut Runs Offers Exclusive to Online Orders
Online Promotions
Social Media
Social Media platforms can be a great tool to reach your customers. Besides regular posts promoting your online ordering link, you should also consider advertising to reach your target audience on these networks.
Papa John’s Promotes Online Ordering Through Social Media Posts
Here are a few other tips:
Replace the Call Now Button On Your Facebook Page with a Shop Now Button which leads customers directly to your Online Ordering Platform.
Remember to include the link to your Online Ordering Platform On Your Instagram Bio.
Instead of leading people to your Website from your twitter profile, send them directly to your online ordering page.
If you are running any offer exclusively for promoting Online Orders, you must ensure that you are posting about these offers on your networks or running ads to reach a larger audience
Run contests to promote online Orders.
Chipotle promotes delivery on it’s Facebook Page
Online Presence
GMB Listing: Promote your online order link on your GMB page
Reputation Management: Before ordering food from any restaurant, customers usually check the website and review sites like TripAdvisor to get an idea of the quality of food and services. Ensure that your website is updated regularly and you have a well-organized system of monitoring and replying to reviews.
You may have to invest some time to promote your online ordering service in its initial days, but once it has taken off you can sit back and reap its benefits over the long run.
Increase Your Restaurant Revenues with FoodKonnekt Online Ordering
Are you looking for a place to eat or a plumber maybe? In the good old days, you may have asked your neighbors or friends for recommendations! Now, you have a personal assistant – “Google” at your fingertips. Each day millions of people are searching on Google for places to eat, nearby salons, plumbers and every other imaginable thing. Google provides businesses a great opportunity to meet their target audience right where they are looking for them- A Google My Business Listing.
Google My Business is completely free to you. It can help boost the local SEO of your website by showing it in local searches. If you have not claimed and optimized your Google My Business listing yet, you are missing out on substantial traffic.
In this article, we will show you how to create and Optimize Google My Business Listing for your Restaurant to reach more customers.
Creating a Google My Business Listing
First off, search for your Business on Google to ensure that it is not already listed on GMB. If your business has been around for a while, chances are that it is already listed on GMB and you just need to claim it. On the other hand, if you’ve used Google tools such as Google Places or Google+ Pages in the past, you would have automatically upgraded to Google My Business.
To claim your business, head over to https://business.google.com/create and enter your Business Name. If the listing has already been created, GMB will show you the following message, you can use any of the options listed here to claim your Business.
Once successfully claimed, you can start optimizing and managing your GMB page.
If you do not already have a GMB listing you would need to Create one
Step 1: Head over to google.com/business, it will prompt you to log in to your google account. Login with your Business account. Once you have logged in, select “Start now” in the top right-hand corner
Step 2: Enter your business name.
Step 3: Business address
Step 4: Select Delivery Area
If you deliver your goods and services to your customers’ locations, check the box “Yes, I also serve them outside my location.” You can also add the delivery area.
Step 6: Choose your business category.
Step 7: Add your business phone number or website.
Step 8: Choose a verification option.
How to Verify Your Business on Google
There are several ways to verify your GMB listing:
By postcard
By phone
By email
Instant verification
Bulk verification
Postcard Verification
If you are opting for this method make sure your business address is correct. Do not make any changes in the business name or address before you receive your code as that could impede the verification process. The postcard should normally reach you in five days, however, if your postcard does not reach you, you can request a new code by signing in to Google My Business and clicking on “Request another code” Once you receive the code, login to GMB and select the listing you want to verify and enter the code to verify your account.
Phone verification
Google allows certain businesses to verify their location by phone. This option will appear for you only if you are eligible. Ensure that you have entered the correct phone number before you select this option. Enter the verification code received via text message to verify your account.
Email verification
You can also choose to “Verify by email.” In this case, google sends a verification email to your registered email id. All you need to do is click the verification button in the email.
Instant verification
If your business has already been verified with Google Search Console, Google will instantly verify your GMB listing.
Bulk verification
If you own more than 10 locations for the same business you might be eligible for bulk verification. Learn more about Bulk Verification.
Once your GMB page has been verified you can start optimizing your profile. Navigate to the left-hand menu and click on Info. Here you can edit the information under each heading/subheading by clicking on the pencil icon
Optimize Google My Business Listing for your Restaurant
1. Ensure your Business information is accurate and up-to-date
Name
Address including Pincode
Service Areas: Let your customers know whether you provide delivery or other services. In this section, you can also provide information regarding the distance or area in which you provide these services.
Provide Accurate Business Operating Hours: Ensure that you update this info on a regular basis- to keep your customers up-to-date on holidays any other changes in operating hours.
Phone Number: (Preferably a Local Number)
Website: In addition to your website, restaurants can also provide the links to their Menu, Order ahead or reservation pages.
Menu/Services: GMB provides the option of adding your menu/services to your GMB listing. It allows you to list out your menu/services so that your customers can see what your business has to offer directly on Google without having to navigate to your website. This feature is only available for food and drink, health, beauty, and other services businesses that don’t have a third-party “menu” link.
Attributes: In this section, you can provide detailed information about the services available at your business. If you are a restaurant, you can provide information about the various amenities that your restaurant provides including dining options, acceptable modes of payment, other things which customers can expect at your restaurants such as kids menu, salad bar, Hallal food, and the like.
Description – add a short description of your business.
The information that you provide on your GMB page should be consistent with that on your website. You can edit and update this information at any time by logging into your GMB account and navigating to the Info tab.
2. Add Photos and Videos
According to Google, Businesses with photos receive 35 percent more click-throughs to their websites than businesses without photos. Photos help you to showcase the best of your business- it gives potential customers a vivid idea of what to expect from your business. Remember the instances, when you are searching for a new place to eat on Google, don’t you like take a look at the interiors of the restaurant to get a better idea of what to expect in terms ambiance or the photos of food to make a fair estimate of the kind of food to expect. Your customers looking for the same.
Good pictures can make or break your business. GMB allows you to upload different kinds of photos of your business to help increase the reach and visibility of your business and is one of the essential steps to optimize Google My Business Listing for your restaurant.
Logo image: Your logo is an important part of your brand identity. Google recommends that you upload your brand’s logo on your GMB listing.
Cover photo: Your cover photo could be anything that fosters your brand image, from a picture of your products to the interiors of your establishment, you could even update your cover image from time to time to showcase the latest offers and deals.
Additional photos: Google allows you to upload additional Pictures of your Business. This could include pictures of your products or interiors and exteriors of your shop or business place.
Videos: You can also add short videos up to 30 seconds.
All information that you have updated on your page is verified by Google and may take up to 3 days to be published. Your GMB listing is now complete and ready for the world.
Monitor Regularly
However, your task is not complete, you must realize that anyone can suggest a change or edit to your business listing. Anyone who searches for your business/or business like yours online can see the “suggest an edit” option marked in the picture below.
By clicking on this option they can edit any business information they want to. And if you do not monitor your page regularly, these changes can go live without your approval. When these changes are made, Google sends out emails to the people managing your Google My Business account, but most account managers claim that they never receive notifications about changes to their listing. So, how do you monitor these– Log in to your GMB page. On the left-hand menu, navigate to manage locations listed towards the bottom. When you click on it- you will be lead to the page below.
Click on review updates to see the updates or edits made to your page.
The changes are highlighted in red- You can confirm these or edit them from here.
Also, it’s important to note that Google crowdsources information about your business by allowing people to answer questions. They can simply click on the “Know this place – answer quick questions” To answer these.
Now, it is all good if a genuine customer answers these questions, but there have been instances when people with malicious intent or your competitor may choose to provide incorrect information that may harm your business. Google, nevertheless, encourages this type of user-generated content as they feel this helps them in providing them a more complete business profile. The only way to regulate these unauthorized changes is to log in to your GMB page regularly and keep an eye on these changes.
Some Additional Features You Should be Using
a. Messaging
Your GMB page provides a great way to connect directly with people interested in your business via Messaging. Your customers can send direct messages to your business via this platform, you can respond to their queries and send them updates on offers and deals. Currently, this service is only available in select countries to only certain types of businesses.
To activate this download the GMB app and open it
If you have multiple locations, open the location you’d like to manage.
Tap Customers.
Tap Message- Tap Turn on to activate.
Once activated – you can see all messages under Customers > Messages
Questions & Answers is another great feature on your GMB listing. Q&A allows people to ask questions about your business and you can answer those questions, but so can any other person. Chances are that when the answers are provided by a customer or any other person, the information may be incorrect or incomplete. But ironically, most of these questions are being answered by customers rather than business owners. The simple reason for this is that business owners are unaware that these questions being asked about their establishment. There are no notifications on your Google My Business dashboard or the GMB app letting you know that there are new questions to be answered. However, there are a few ways to find these questions:
Search for your business on a desktop/ laptop and see if there are new questions.
Install Google Maps on your phone, log in and check for questions/notifications.
Search for your business on a mobile browser and check if you have new questions that need to be answered.
Qn A
A great way to use this feature is to prepare a list of FAQs about your business and add them to your GMB listing- this would help in providing all essential and correct information about your business to your customers.
P.S. Google has recently started sending out email notifications letting you know that a new question has been asked.
c. Booking Button Feature
Google’s Booking button feature can help your customers book an appointment with your business directly from your Google My Business listing. To enable the booking button, choose and sign up with one of their scheduling providers. You can receive bookings through Google once your scheduling account is linked to your Google My Business account. (This might take a week after you sign-up).
If you already use a scheduling provider, the booking button is automatically updated on your GMB listing. You can see your booking history with that provider under the bookings tab in your Google My Business account.
Another area of concern for businesses is that sometimes a booking or ordering ling appear automatically on their GMB listing in Google search and Google Maps. For instance, if you are a restaurant owner- you would suddenly see a Doordash – link on your profile which you have not added- Here’s what Google has to say about these links:
Why some links appear automatically
d. Manage & Respond to Customer Reviews
Your customers can leave reviews for your business on Google. These appear on your GMB page under the reviews tab. These reviews also appear on the knowledge panel when a customer searches for your business on google or google maps. Most people searching for your business online would go through these reviews before making a decision to purchase from you. So it becomes important to respond to both positive and negative reviews to engage your customers and show them that you value their feedback.
Google provides you a great opportunity to update your customers with the latest and the greatest at your establishment via GMB posts. Your customers can view your latest posts on the knowledge panel when they search for your business on google. You can create offers, events or general posts showcasing your products.
Wrap Up
Here we have rounded up some of the interesting features available to you on your GMB page and strategies to optimize Google My Business Listing for your restaurant you make the most of them.
In an era where convenience takes precedence overall, more and more customers are choosing to order food from restaurants that offer delivery. To keep up with customer expectations, restaurants are under pressure to provide a seamless delivery experience.
However, the cost associated with setting up in-house delivery is significant. On the other hand, third-party delivery services, which seem like the smart choice in this scenario, are extracting hefty commissions. Most restaurant owners are in a dilemma over the in-house versus third-party delivery debate. In this article, we discuss the pros and cons of both these options to help you choose better.
In-House Delivery
In-house delivery requires restaurants to hire a dedicated delivery staff and preferably their own fleet of vehicles to deliver food to customers.
Pros
a. Control over the Customer Experience
Setting up your own delivery services allows you to control the entire delivery experience, including the timeline or any additional benefits you may want to offer to your customers.
b. Customer Engagement:
By offering in-house delivery, you have a greater opportunity to engage directly with your customers and immediately resolve any issues that may crop up in the delivery process.
c. Customer Data:
If your customers are placing their orders directly through your website or app, you have access to all relevant data for these customers, which helps you to strategize and build on your future marketing plans.
d. Builds Brand loyalty:
When a customer uses your website or app to order, the customers are engaging directly with your brand. This helps you tobuild brand loyaltyin the long run.
Cons
a. High Costs:
The costs required to set up and maintain your own delivery fleet can be quite high.
b. Logistical Concerns:
Offering a smooth in-house delivery experience requires a lot of effort in terms of people, time, and resources, and management of the delivery drivers.
c. Responsibility:
If anything goes wrong with the delivery experience, such as a delay in delivery orders or food not reaching the customers in the right state- your brand is directly affected, there can be no blame-shifting in this case.
Third-Party Delivery
As an alternative, you could outsource the entire delivery service to another company. You can tie up with companies like GrubHub, Doordash, and Ubereats to take care of processing orders and delivering food to customers on behalf of your restaurant.
With 60 percent of U.S. consumers ordering delivery or takeout once a week, the third-party delivery market is expected to grow to a value of $24.5 billion by 2022.
Pros
a. Convenience:
Opting for third-party delivery services is definitely the more convenient way of delivering food to your customers as it outsources the entire gamut of logistical concerns related to processing orders and delivering food on time to another company.
b. New Customers
57 percent of millennials claim that they prefer food to be delivered by restaurants so they can stay home to watch movies and TV shows. If you are not offering delivery, you are missing out on these customers.
By tying up with the third-party delivery services you gain access to a much wider audience native to these apps. Many customers who may have previously shied away from ordering from your restaurant due to the nonavailability of delivery services would now be ready to order from you. In many cases, customers who get a taste of your food through these online orders may choose to visit your location at a later stage.
c. Cut Down on Costs
By opting for a third-party delivery service, you can save a significant amount of costs required for setting up and maintenance of the delivery fleet.
d. Increase in Sales
60 percent of restaurant owners claim that offering delivery services has generated incremental sales. Offering your menu on these platforms introduces your brand to a wider set of audience, thereby increasing the average number of online orders your restaurant receives.
e. Better Allocation of Resources
Once you have outsourced delivery, you have more time and resources on your hands to focus on the quality of food and services that you bring to the table.
f. Marketing and Advertising
Most third-party delivery companies provide advertising and marketing for restaurants on their app for an additional cost. You no longer have to worry about devising strategies to reach new customers, as these services take care of the same.
Cons
a. Loss of Control Over Customer Experience
By opting to outsource deliveries to a third-party, you lose control over several aspects of the customer experience. Factors such as traffic, an excessive number of orders, the state in which the food is delivered can affect your brand reputation.
Several restaurants have complained of untrained delivery staff hired by third-party delivery services. There have been several reported incidents of delivery drivers disrupting the normal functioning of the restaurants during pick-ups, or sour behavior with the customers.
b. Declining Revenues
In the long run, many restaurants claim that in spite of the increase in the number of online orders received per month, they are witnessing a decline in their profits due to the high margin charged by these services on every order placed through their app.
Your restaurant may not be equipped to handle the increased number of orders that you are likely to receive via these apps. To meet the demand and to ensure the smooth operation of your in-store services, you may have to handle additional staff. There are several such administrative costs that may arise in the long run, which impinge on your margins.
c. A Decline in Brand loyalty
When a customer orders from your restaurant via these apps, there is no direct engagement between these customers and your restaurant. So, effectively customers who are ordering from your restaurant via the app become customers of the app or the service. They owe their loyalty to the app instead of your restaurant. According to a survey, 43 percent of restaurant professionals said they believe third-party apps hamper the direct relationship between a restaurant and its customers.
d. Loss of Customer Data
Most third-party delivery services in the restaurant industry are not sharing customer data with the restaurants. Restaurants no longer have any means to reach these customers directly or build on their marketing strategies to retain these customers in the future.
e. Vulnerable to Competition
Once you make your restaurant available on these apps, your brand is competing with all the restaurants in the vicinity that offer similar food. So a customer will choose to order from you only if you are at the top of your game.
Further, your restaurant may not appear at the top of search results on third-party apps, in spite of having higher ratings, as ranking on these apps is also determined by the amount you are paying to these services.
Most of the third-party delivery services are big companies with huge marketing budgets. In order to promote their app, they are offering huge offers and discounts on orders placed through their app. Individual restaurants may not be able to compete with these offers, further discouraging customers to order directly from them. Many restaurant owners feel it’s similar to losing your customers to the app.
Wrap-up
When faced with the question of whether to opt for a third-party delivery company or set up your own, you must consider all the above-mentioned factors before deciding what would work best for you. A detailed cost-benefit analysis with a long term perspective- will help you make a better decision.
Email marketing refers to sending out emails to promote your business. Restaurant Email marketing has been around for quite some time and is being successfully used by businesses to send updates about the brand, dole out promotions, offer coupons, and remain in touch with new and existing customers.
Some marketers erroneously believe that restaurant email marketing has lost its relevance with the introduction of new mediums to reach out to the customers. However, the fact remains that email marketing has evolved and remains an incredibly important marketing tool, and having clearly email marketing strategies for your restaurant can help you get better returns from your campaigns.
Here are some interesting stats to turn you into an email marketing enthusiast:
At least 91% of consumers check their email on a daily basis.
Data from Marketing Sherpa says that 72 percent of consumers prefer email as their source of business communication.
The average spend of customers buying products marketed through email is 138% more than those who do not receive email offers.
According to Optinmonster, only 15% of the marketing budget spent on email marketing, yields an ROI that is 28% higher than digital marketing.
Email Marketing Strategies for your Restaurant
Emails are a great medium to reach out and stay in constant contact with your customers. In fact, there are numerous creative ways in which you can use emails to send out the right marketing message to your restaurant’s customers. Here we have listed a few of those.
1. Get the Word Out
You are pretty excited about the new dish that you have just introduced to your menu. Now, you are dying to know how your customers receive this new introduction. Sending them an introductory offer to try the new dish through an email can help you get the word out. Sending exclusive invites to longtime patrons makes them feel like privileged insiders and helps in building long-term bonds.
2. Promote Offers/Special Days
Most restaurants have offers or deals marking special days or holidays. Perhaps, you have a planned a special for Fathers on the occasion of Father’s day or you are running deals on each day of the Pizza Month in October. You could send updates on these offers and promotions to your customers.
A monthly newsletter is a great way of letting your customers know about all the offers they can avail of in any given month. A follow-up email just a few days prior to the event or promotion can be sent out as a reminder to help them make the most of the offer.
3. Fundraisers
Many restaurants regularly host fundraisers on behalf of local organizations as a part of their community-building initiative. Sharing the details of such events with your regular customers can help you to increase participation in these events while sending out the message that you as a brand care for the community.
4. Behind the Scene Stories
Every communication that you send out to your customers does not necessarily need to sell a product. You can add value by sending out curated content- every once in a while. It could be a story from your restaurant- a gesture by a customer that touched your heart, or an account of how and where you source your raw materials, you can even share strategies that you follow at your restaurant to manage waste. In fact, you can share anything that you feel may be of interest to your customers.
5. Share a Recipe
Every once in a while, you can share the recipe of a popular dish on your menu. This is a great way to open a line of communication with your customers. You can invite your customers to pour suggestions on how they would modify the recipe if they were to prepare the same at home. You can even go ahead and share some of these interesting ideas on social media.
6. Promote Restaurant Services
There are so many services that your restaurant may be offering which your customers may or may not be aware of. You can create a series of emails to help them use these facilities better.
For instance, reservations- where and how they can reserve a table at your restaurant.
Online ordering- You maybe be taking orders on-call or orders placed on your website or you may have tied up with third-party online ordering services. Are your customers aware of all the ways in which they can place an order? Do they know how easy it is to pay for these orders? These are questions that you can deal with in these emails.
Delivery- In many cases, the customers are not aware that there favorite eating joint offers delivery, or how far do they offer delivery, what are the charges. An email listing out all the possible FAQs could be very helpful.
7. Promote your Loyalty Program
Loyalty programs are a great way to retain existing customers. The ground staff in your restaurant has very little opportunity to explain the nuances and benefits of the program to store visitors. Email provides you a great medium to send out details of the program to your customers from sign-up to reward redemption.
8. Send out Personalized Offers
Emails offer your endless opportunities to send out personalized offers to your customers. Personalized emails have a much higher conversion rate. You can segment customers based on
Previous purchase history
Location
Kind of coupons they usually redeem
Offers that interest them most
Open Rate
Dormant/ Active Customers
Abandoned Carts
These are just a few examples. Depending on the nature of your restaurant and the kind of offer you have in mind you can segregate customers who you feel would be interested in the particular offer you are sending out.
9. Collect Feedback
You bring great food to the table, offer exceptional services and believe that are you are doing your best. But no successful business can do without customer feedback. Emails are a great way to collect feedback. You can ask for customers feedback on specific services like online orders, delivery or more general feedback about the food and services at your store.
10. Bday emails
Retaining your current customers is up to 7x cheaper than acquiring new ones. Did you know that Birthday emails have a 481% higher transaction rate than promotional emails and on an average, they generate a 342% higher revenue per email than promotional emails?
Running a birthday campaign can help you bolster engagement with your customers. You can plan and set up a campaign to collect birthdays by asking your customers to sign up on your website, or you can even embed a form on social media sites like Facebook to collect such data. Once you have collected this data, use it to set up an automated campaign through MailChimp or any other application to send out specials to your customers on their birthdays.
11. Retarget Website Visitors
You have invested a lot of effort and money in building a great website and prompting customers to visit your website or app. But are you following up with these visitors?
You may have data on what pages your customers are visiting where they are dropping off, but are you putting this data to use?
Adding a pop-up form to your website nudging customers to subscribe to your newsletter helps you keeping a track of these visitors and once you have the list, you can use it to market to these customers.
Wrap Up
Email Marketing is the fastest, easiest, and most inexpensive way to reach customers. We would love to know what strategies are you using to get more out of your Email Campaigns.
Chatbots are programs built to automatically engage with the customers visiting your website or social media pages. These bots are programmed to send out automated replies in response to customer queries.
Types of Chatbots:
1. Driven by Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence:
This type of chatbot understands natural language and commands and uses machine learning to adapt responses in accordance with the context.
2. Keyword based chatbots
These are driven by a set of predetermined answers that are triggered in response to certain keywords. They rely on a large database of frequently asked questions to produce the best response and therefore may not be correct 100% of the times.
Your customers don’t have to download another app to use these chatbots. They can be accessed via existing chat apps such as Facebook Messenger , Whatsapp or website chat windows to receive and respond to messages.
Chatbots have been around for quite some time. However with the recent advances in natural language processing and AI, Chatbot technology has grown robust enough to meet the challenges of modern marketing.
According to a drift survey customers use chatbots for a number of purposes such as
Research from Sprout Social shows that the number of social messages requiring a response from a brand increased by 18% from 2015 to 2016.
The millennial customers expects brands to be available 24×7 to answer questions, clear doubts and guide them through the purchase journey. Providing around the clock customer support requires huge investment in terms of time and resources, which may not always be feasible. By automating conversations you could save time and money that can then be allocated to other areas that require your attention.
2. Nurture Customers
Every customer visiting your restaurant’s website or social media pages may not have an intention to buy. He may be just checking on offers or perusing through the menu.
You can program your chatbot to engage with these customers, ask questions to guide them in the right direction, share menus, pricing , or collect their email ids. Providing quick responses and resolving queries helps you to create a better user experience.
3. Generate Sales
You can use chatbots to connect directly to all your customers sending them personalized offers and recommendation in accordance with their purchase history.
Many popular restaurant chains are successfully using chatbots to promote offers and discounts, limited time deals or loyalty privileges. They can also be used to allow your customers to make reservations or order ahead.
4. Provide ‘After Hours’ Support
According to data from Drift, most people use chatbots get quick answers to questions. Your customers can get the information they are looking for via these chatbots chatbot even when your business is closed.
5. Generate Leads
You can use Chatbots to nurture prospects and gathers email addresses of prospective customers, which can be used for your future marketing campaigns.
GETTING STARTED WITH CHATBOTS
Taco Bot By Taco bell Made Online Ordering a Breeze
There are a few ways in which you can get a Chatbot for your restaurant
1. Building your own bot:
Coding your own chatbot, be it from scratch or using NLP Platforms involves a huge investment in terms of time and a steep learning curve. You would also need prior knowledge of coding and natural language processing.
Use DIY platforms for building a bot –
There are some platforms which provide you with Drag ‘n’ Drop features to build chatbots without any coding.
Hire An agency:
You can hire an agency to create a fully functional chatbot for you.
Whichever method you choose, there are several other aspects which require your attention before roll out your restaurant’s chatbot.
2. Preparing to Launch
a. Define Your Goal
Spend time at the onset to define the goals you are looking to achieve from the chatbot. It could range from
Engaging your customers
Resolving customer service issues
Promoting menu items, offers and deals
Acquiring new customers
Having clear goals in mind helps you to develop a strategy and build out a unique experience.
Subway’s order ahead bot on Facebook Messenger
b. Choose Platforms to Leverage
Consider the channels you would like to take your programs live on. The answer to this would depend on your goals and also which channel in your opinion could provide you with the maximum leverage
Social Media Channels
Facebook Messenger
Twitter Direct Message
Whatsapp messenger
You can check your Facebook and Twitter insights to get an idea of how many of your audiences visit these platforms regularly. Also, consider how many of your followers are on Facebook Messenger and how they are using the channel. You should also check on the audience demographics on each of these channels.
Your Website
Check your website analytics to see where you get maximum visitors. What are these visitors doing on your site. What kind of assistance or experience could you offer to these visitors.
All these metrics will help you to decide which platform to leverage and what kind of communication(Via Your Chatbot) would be appropriate on that channel.
c. Build Your Content Strategy
Once you have finalized your goals and the platform you plan to employ, you can start working on the experience you want to offer to your customers.
Think about what questions customers are likely to ask your chatbot. Think of multiple responses to every question. Build flows for each turn a conversation could take- think about the kind of information you would like to disseminate through these conversations, such as information about offers or deals, your loyalty program, specials, and the like. Figure out how you can take a prospective conversation in the intended direction while fully satisfying customer needs.
Pizza Hut”s Bot On FB Messenger allows you to order just by sending an emoji
d. Craft Your Bot’s Voice
Your chatbot is ultimately another extension of your brand. Ensure that its voice and personality is aligned to your brand image. Many restaurant give a name to their bot to humanize the whole experience.
Laying down these basics at the onset facilitates the bot building process and helps you provide a better customer experience.
Wingstop launched its Bot both on Facebook and Twitter
BEST PRACTICES
a. Maintain Transparency:Let your customers know they’re chatting with a bot so they do not feel misled at a later stage.
b. Call-To-Action Buttons:Use CTAs to drive users to a specific goal such as leading them to your online ordering page or sharing their experience with friends on social networks.
c. Always Offer a Way to Exit :Give your customers the option to switch over to a human assistant at any time they wish to.
d. Gather Customer Feedback: Don’t forget to ask your customers whether they enjoyed the interaction with your chatbot and the improvements they would like to see.
e. Promote your bot: The success of your chatbot would depend on how well you promote it. Go all out on letting your customers know that you are offering them a exciting new way to interact with your brand.
Wrap Up
Like all other marketing initiatives, you would need to monitor and analyze the performance of your chatbot in the long-run and look for ways in which you could improve customer experience on your Bot.
