How Restaurants Can Generate More Orders With Automation
If you're starting from scratch, here are the 3 steps that make this —almost— effortless for a restaurant: retrieve customer data, activate your base by generating orders and build loyalty.
For a restaurant, generating its orders has become vital to stay confident during the crisis.
Generating orders has become vital for a restaurant to overcome the side effects of inflation and rising energy costs. Using a standard delivery service increases resilience and secures margins—for a much cheaper fee than the ordering platform. By obtaining more orders, a restaurant can drastically boost its revenues without overloading its dining room and ensure the sustainability of its brand.
Quite recently, automated marketing has flipped the table: It enables independent restaurants to generate orders with a deceivingly easy setup and gives them powerful levers to create, activate, and retain a customer base. If you're starting from scratch, here are the 3 steps that make this almost effortless for a restaurant: retrieve customer data, activate your base by generating orders, and build loyalty.
1. Enrich your restaurant's customer data
Customer data is essential to any restaurant owner. Being able to contact customers is the key to generating orders independently. The first step is to build up an enriched customer file to make the most of this goldmine.
Centralizing customer data
Restaurant-specific Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools allow owners to build customer files quickly. They can centralize all of their customers’ information and collect the data that matters in an automated way. More specifically, gathering cellphone numbers is essential data: making them your unique identifier paves the way for retargeting customers and activating the most effective automated marketing levers.
Retrieve data of your customers from delivery platforms
Priority should be given to customers who have already ordered from you: they are more likely to come again. However, restaurants often miss this data simply because food ordering platforms rarely share their customer data with restaurants.
To fill this void in your database, you can reach those customers and retrieve their data through engagement hacks. To get their attention, you can print messages on a flyer and stick them in your delivery bags—or staple them to them—to convey your message.
Those flyers can be used for all kinds of engagement levers. For example, a restaurant owner can propose a gift wheel through a printed QR Code. This hack has two positive effects: delivery customers are invited to leave their contact info to turn the wheel, and the rewards—coupons or free items—serve as incentives to generate more orders.
2. Generate orders from your customer base
With a rich database of previous customers and phone numbers, orders can be generated automatically on the restaurant’s favorite distribution channel. Provided that these customers have opted in to promotional texts, several automation levers can be activated.
Empower ordering customers with a gift wheel
Like a gift wheel, marketing games can be implemented to gamify delivery orders. A restaurant owner can share it with their client file through text messages. He/she can also share it :
On the restaurant’s social networks
On its point-of-sale display
On the storefront for passers-by
On flyers
Gift wheels are a fun way to re-engage customers instead of waiting for them to return.
Discounts — -10%, -20%
Buy one, get one free (BOGO)
Free items — drink or dessert.
They’ll feel incentivized to order at your restaurant on their next occasion.
Make the most of automated SMS marketing
SMS marketing is underutilized by restaurateurs. Yet it is one of the most effective engagement channels: 90% of SMS messages are read within 3 minutes.
Once you have a restaurant’s customer base that includes phone numbers, you can generate orders by sending empowering automated campaigns. You can plan sendings for the big dates of the year: sports competitions and public holidays, among others. In addition to highlighting your order intake, you can take advantage of the opportunity to broadcast your news, launchings, or events.
3. Build customer loyalty effortlessly
How to keep your customers coming back
Once you’ve got customers flowing — on delivery or in the dining room — there is still one thing to automate: customer loyalty. To keep customers coming back, customer experience is the key. But it’s not all you can do. It’s also advisable to propose a unique loyalty program that reflects your brand identity.
With a points-based loyalty system (1€/$1 = 1 point or 1 visit = 10 points), you can offer personalized rewards based on individual preferences, providing a much greater incentive for customers to place orders at your restaurant.
Other loyalty program ideas include engaging your customers with the following rewards:
Cashback
Coupons
Doubled or tripled loyalty points on specific hours
VIP status
Free delivery
Free services or complimentary products
Anticipated access to new collections
Courses and workshops
Loyalty programs for customer commitment
In addition to gifting and trading points, a loyalty program enables many more engagement opportunities. For example, a restaurant loyalty program can also award points for :
Social network interactions (follow, comment, mention, etc.)
If the customer orders on a usually quiet day
Taking part in a survey
Entering a birthdate
Referrals
Automating customers’ data collection, SMS marketing, and loyalty programs is a must-do for independent restaurateurs. Food Tech startups are making these automated tools available to all restaurants. Working closely with restaurateurs, Hey Pongo has designed empowering loyalty programs. By improving customer experience on all their touchpoints, online and offline, restaurants can generate more orders and sales through automated marketing levers effectively.
Above all, automation helps increase each customer's long-term value and helps restaurants develop new vital strengths: becoming more profitable and resilient to any challenge.
About the author
Matthieu Gagnot. Mindfulness enthusiast and customer engagement specialist. My mission is to help restaurants go digital with next-gen smart tools. I try to put understandable words on advanced marketing levers - and on everything we do at Hey Pongo.