Discovery to Devotion: How to Build Customer Loyalty Through Delivery

The online food ordering has grown 300% faster than dine-in since 2014, making up 40% of total restaurant sales. 

If you’re ready to scale your business, capture more customers, and promote loyalty, now is the best time to analyze your delivery operations and make sure they meet customer expectations.

This article gives you the tools to better understand how to build stronger relationships with your customers at every stage of the customer journey with improved delivery operations.

What is the customer journey?

The customer journey is the path of interactions an individual has with your restaurant, including your menu, offerings, marketing, and services. Generally, the customer journey breaks down into five phases: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and loyalty. 

The ways customers engage with a business during each phase of the customer journey will differ depending on the industry. But for restaurants that offer delivery, the customer journey could look similar to this:

• Awareness: Customer hears about your restaurant through a third-party delivery app, search engine, ads, billboards, or word-of-mouth.

• Consideration: Customer reviews your menu and checks your ratings online, on your website, or in a delivery app.

• Purchase: Customer places a delivery order from your restaurant.

• Retention: Your restaurant makes customers feel special to keep them returning through promotions, personalized experiences, or a loyalty program.

• Loyalty: The customer becomes a regular, leaves a glowing review online, and recommends your restaurant to friends and family.

Restaurants strive to earn their customers’ loyalty by engaging potential and new customers at each phase of the journey with ideal experiences. Let’s dive deeper into how to accomplish this for your customers who order through delivery.

Building customer loyalty with delivery: 4 steps

1. Awareness: get discovered

Building a relationship with customers is challenging if they aren’t aware your restaurant exists. Step one of promoting customer loyalty is making your business visible in all places where today’s consumers go when they’re hungry.

It’s still common for hungry consumers to use search engines to find restaurant recommendations nearby. So, it’s wise to optimize your Google listing for local SEO. But with 63% of young adults using online delivery from third-party apps, it’s also a winning move to list your restaurant on apps like Uber Eats to enhance your restaurant’s reach.

Once your restaurant is officially on a delivery app, you can rest assured you’re reaching customers in the awareness phase of the customer journey who also have high intent to buy. In other words, your restaurant is now easily discoverable on delivery apps by hordes of hungry people ready to place an order.

To reach even more customers on third-party apps, you can also promote your restaurant to new customers by running some highly targeted ads right in the feed of the delivery apps where customers are browsing. Third-party delivery platforms offer granular targeting, so your ad will appear to people actively looking for a restaurant like yours.

2. Consideration and purchase: increase engagement 

Now that your restaurant is visible on more delivery platforms, it’s time to stand out and encourage potential customers to view your menu and place an order.

To engage customers as they move through the consideration and purchase phases of the customer journey, consider launching irresistible in-app offers.

For example, you can set up a BOGO (buy one, get one free) offer, a spend $X and save $Y offer, a free appetizer or drink with a minimum purchase, or a $0 Delivery Fee.

Stats show that discounting is the perfect way to encourage first-time buyers to complete a purchase. RetailMeNot found:

• 80% of consumers will feel encouraged to buy with a new brand if they see an offer

• 69% of millennials say they won’t complete a purchase without looking for a deal first

• 67% of consumers have purchased something they weren’t planning to when they found a discount

The research is clear: consumers browsing or considering placing an order are much more likely to do so if they see an enticing offer. So, take advantage and create a compelling offer to seal the deal.

3. Retention: nurture relationships

Retaining customers isn’t an art - it’s a science. With the help of third-party delivery app analytics, you can see which menu items your customers order most often. Then, you can double down on the marketing strategies that promote and spotlight those customer favorites.

Another part of nurturing customer relationships and prioritizing retention is showing your customers you care about their experiences. On many third-party food-ordering platforms, customers can leave a review, and you can respond to those reviews directly.

When you see reviews - positive or negative - pop up, respond as soon as possible. Ensure every review gets an answer by setting up review notifications and dedicating someone on your team to checking and answering reviews. 

If a review is positive, thank the customer and acknowledge their favorable comment. If the customer had a negative experience, respond immediately and prioritize resolving their concerns. Responding to customer reviews is important because it shows that you genuinely care about customers, improving your reputation and promoting loyalty.

4. Loyalty: expand delivery options

Today’s consumers are used to getting instant services on any platform from any device in almost every industry, and the world of online food delivery is leading the charge.

When customers are hungry, they want to be able to place an order on any platform. Some of your most loyal customers may even prefer to order from you directly - including on your website, on your app, and by your phone number. Offering on-demand delivery from your sales channels is a powerful way to meet customers’ demand for instant delivery. When you can deliver their favorite order accurately every time, it encourages them to return and order from you repeatedly.

If you’re not equipped to set up your delivery program or need to improve your current delivery program to boost loyalty, don’t worry. The best third-party delivery apps offer white-label, on-demand delivery. You can set up delivery options on your own sales channels (like your website or phone) and have your food delivered by a third-party courier network.

Strengthen customer relations with more delivery options and improved delivery operations. 

Customers who have a negative delivery experience (for instance, they don’t get their order on time or can’t easily place an order) will likely not buy from that company again.

The opposite is also true. When customers have a great delivery experience, it only makes sense that they’ll continue to order from that restaurant.

In essence, delivery plays a huge role in building relationships and fostering customer loyalty. And it’s critical to meet customers’ expectations for outstanding delivery at every stage of the customer journey. To do this, it might also mean you’re managing delivery operations from several channels, including third-party apps like Uber Eats and all of your channels.

To make this easy, there’s Deliverect. Deliverect’s seamless integration with POS systems consolidates orders from any online platform. This simplifies operations, removes manual processes, and lets you leverage additional sales channels to serve more customers and boost revenues. 

Learn how Deliverect has partnered with Uber Eats to help restaurants across the globe manage online orders and scale delivery operations from a single platform.

About the author

THE UBER EATS TEAM

Uber Eats is a global platform that connects businesses to millions of customers and delivery people worldwide. We empower businesses of all types and sizes to build seamless online delivery and logistics operations. Active in 11,000+ cities across 6 continents, we’re proud to help more than 890,000 merchant partners expand their reach, deepen customer relationships, and tap into flexible product solutions that can scale with their growth.