Chances are you’ve either contacted (or have been contacted by) DoorDash, GrubHub, or Uber Eats if you own a restaurant. They’re great third-party restaurant delivery services that allow you to easily get food delivered to your customers so they never have to leave the couch. In fact, delivery services saw a huge increase in 2018. There’s only one problem… you have a lack of control which means your customers are their customers. While it makes it easier for them to get their food, it’s actually putting a huge wall in between your restaurant’s brand and your customers.
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There’s Too Much Friction Between Your Brand & Your Customers
The delivery driver pulls up to your house… they’re wearing a red branded shirt, have a red branded bag, and a logo on their car. You used an app to order a restaurant’s food and get it delivered straight to your house within 1 hour of time. You’ll likely never see the delivery driver again, but you’ll use the service again because of its convenience. The delivery service took all the credit. The only thing the customer got from the restaurant was the food – and that’s just a small part of what’s important. The other part – the part that is missing from delivery orders – is the overall restaurant experience.
We advise our clients that use these food delivery services to focus on how they can take a similar experience you get when you walk into the restaurant and inject it into the delivery experience. This means focusing more on packaging and what you include. What does every customer get when they walk into your restaurant? Do they get a warm smile, a smell of seared beef, and mariachi music in the background? What are ways you can include things in your packaging that can help bring the experience to your customers? Here’s your homework: Write out a list of things people love about your restaurant (that is not your food). To get some ideas, look through reviews on your social media pages to see what people are saying about your restaurant.
You Don’t Know Who Your Customers Are
Let’s think about this… the customer browsed a website or app and picked your restaurant. They create an account which includes their contact info. The delivery service keeps their information and uses the customers’ purchase history to better advertise towards them and to make more money getting them to order delivery from other restaurants more often. The delivery service may provide you names and analytics from your purchase history, but can you use this information other than making vague assumptions on whether or not you had a “slow day” or a “busy day”? No.
Finding a way to collect information from your customers and getting to know them better is vital to your restaurant’s future growth. While the delivery service knows exactly who Jack Smith is, knows he prefers Italian food over any
How to Maximize the Value of Third-Party Restaurant Delivery Services Like DoorDash, GrubHub and Uber Eats
Finally, let’s talk about some ways you can maximize the value in your delivery orders by collecting information about your customers in the process.
When you connect your Facebook Page to automated messaging software, you can contact your customers using Facebook Messenger without ever being on your phone or your computer. Here’s how: Each time a customer communicates with your business on Facebook Messenger, they become a subscriber. In the natural flow of a conversation, you can collect info like email address, phone number, ask open-ended questions, ask specific questions, instantly send them directions to your business, and ask them for feedback on their experience.
“This sounds great! But we don’t get a lot of messages on our Facebook Page.” – We’re glad you asked. The Messenger software we use at Sharpen Marketing allows us to not only create these pre-defined conversational flows, but it also allows us to create scannable QR codes. The QR Codes (once scanned) trigger a new conversation with your customer. Each QR Code you create can link to a different conversation. Let us paint a picture of how you could use this for your restaurant:
- A paper insert is taped to the to-go box that includes a QR Code – that when scanned, they’ll get asked for feedback. If the user scans it, your restaurant starts a conversation (automatically, of course) with the customer and asks predesigned questions to get better information about how their experience was. If they had a great experience, we program it to ask them to leave a review on services like Yelp, Facebook, Trip Advisor, or Google. If it’s bad, we send a notification to the manager or owner so they can call the customer immediately to make things right.
- Just like the last point, you could instead, offer $5 off their next order. This will promote increased customer retention by getting them to come in a 2nd and 3rd time. Prefer more dine-in orders? Make the offer only good for dine-in only.
- Once you have them in Facebook Messenger, you can easily pre-program the conversation to ask them for their email address and phone number. If you offer text marketing or email marketing as well, you can have their info pushed automatically to those other systems and subscribe them to other marketing campaigns that run parallel to your Messenger Marketing strategy.
- BONUS IDEA #1: A QR code at each table on a table topper. When customers scan it, it logs their visit and thanks them for being a customer. After 7 visits, they get a free dessert. A completely custom restaurant loyalty program that requires no new software.
- BONUS IDEA #2: At local community events, have your employees, ambassadors or street team hold signs announcing that event attendees will get something for free that evening if they approach you. Instruct your team to show a piece of paper the event attendees can scan that then sends them the offer via Facebook Messenger. This will automatically add them as a “subscriber” so you can reach back out to them in the future to try and get them back into your restaurant again and again.
