Online ordering has become one of the hottest trends in the food and beverage industry.
According to Zippia, online food ordering has grown 300% faster than dine-in since 2014 and now accounts for roughly 40% of total restaurant sales.
Likewise, 60% of Americans order delivery at least once per week and the average American spends $67 on takeout per week.
Quick Links:
+ Marketing Automation Campaign Strategy
+ Guest Segmentation and Personalization Strategy
+ Intelligence Online Digital Advertising Strategy
It’s easy to see that online ordering should be a focus for your restaurant business. Other benefits include:
- Reduced wait times for guests
- Increased order accuracy
- Improved guest satisfaction
- Higher average order values
- Reduced labor costs
There is one even more powerful benefit that can supercharge your restaurant marketing – collecting guest data.
Online Ordering Marketing Strategies
When your guests place an online order, you can collect valuable information, such as their name, postal code, food and beverage preferences, and spending habits. Most importantly, you are also collecting their contact information like their email address and/or phone number.
With this data, online ordering marketing becomes a possibility that can not only improve your marketing ROI but also increase guest loyalty and lifetime values.
With a database of guest data and contact information, you can begin using it for marketing campaigns. Here are a few online ordering marketing strategies you can use to build your restaurant business.
1. Marketing Automation Campaigns
Marketing automation is a tool that can save a great deal of time and energy. Bloom Intelligence
With marketing automation, all you have to do is configure the campaign once and it will execute behind the scenes automatically.
First, you create a message for the campaign that will be sent to your guests. Then, you configure the triggers that will cause the message to be emailed to the guest. From that point on, your marketing message will be sent to each guest who meets the triggering criteria.
Examples
There are many different triggers and combinations.
- Happy Birthday Campaign – this is one of the most popular and successful campaigns. The message would be sent to guests a few days prior to their birthday. Typically it will include an offer they can redeem on their special day.
- Survey Campaign – send a message to guests asking them to rate their recent experience. It can be sent at a predetermined time after they order online.
- Ratings Campaign – send a message to guests asking them to rate you on a popular ratings website like Google or Facebook. This is a great way to have consistent ratings and spot trends and sentiment.
- At-risk Guest Campaign – when guests have not ordered online in a given amount of time, or when they have surpassed their typical ordering time, send a message enticing them to come back.
- Milestone Campaign – send a message with a reward for guests when they reach a particular milestone, such as the 10th time they order online.
- Upon Registration Campaign – send a thank you message to guests when they first sign up for online ordering.
- Upon Ordering Campaign – send any message you wish whenever guests order online. It can be configured to be sent a certain amount of time after the order, depending upon the topic of your message.
These are just a few of the marketing automation messages you can send to your guests for online ordering marketing. You can also send triggered messages based on guest demographics.
For instance, you can send a message to men over 30, or guests from a specific postal code. The combinations are nearly limitless.
2. Use Guest Segmentation
As you grow your database of guests, you can begin to identify specific guest personas and group them together, sending more targeted messaging.
Customer segmentation is an online ordering marketing strategy of “segmenting” your current and potential guests into distinct groups (market segments) and then marketing your business to them using focused, group-specific methods.
Guests are split into groups based on their demographic data– age, location, etc.– and their behavioral and psychographic data – what online content they interact with, how they behave at your place of business, and their perceived interests.
These groups are called segments, and each segment has its own persona. Different personae like to be marketed to in certain ways.
Based on marketing research, when you engage with clients with unique, individualized methods, you’re more likely to garner interest and ultimately draw leads to your website.
The Goal of Guest Segmentation
The ultimate goal of guest segmentation is to adjust your messaging to appeal to different segments. Guest segmentation helps certain demographic-specific businesses find their guests among the highly populated masses online.
For instance, cosmetic companies are probably looking for young, female clients that are particularly interested in beauty products. They’ll market themselves exclusively to this relevant segment.
Similarly, a skateboarding company knows that it isn’t relevant to the population at large. They will try to find relevant clients in urban teenagers and young adults.
So, marketing their products to seniors and middle-aged business people would produce little return on investment. Therefore, these companies would be wasting their marketing budgets without using effective guest segmentation.
The restaurant industry, meanwhile, has mass appeal. You aren’t necessarily looking to narrow down your audience as much as fine-tuning the voice of your marketing strategies to speak to different restaurant guests.
The voice of your marketing messages should be very different for older business people as it is for teenage skateboarders, but the message at the root of your strategy is the same: people should come to your restaurant!
3. Intelligent Online Digital Advertising
Google and Facebook are moving away from cookie-based advertising. This means there is no way to target specific guests, or groups of guests, without uploading your own data.
With Bloom Intelligence, you can quickly build a large clean guest database to help you find new guests.
By building your own first-party guest database from online ordering, you will open up the opportunity to remarket to those guests online using Google or Facebook/Instagram ads.
One of the most effective ways to keep current guests coming back is to execute a remarketing campaign aimed at your current and past guests. With your own first-party data, this becomes very easy to do.
According to Signifi Media, the average click-through rate (CTR) for remarketing ads is 10 times higher than regular display ads.
The average CTR for retargeted ads is 0.7% compared to 0.07% for regular display ads.
A CTR of 0.7% is a significantly better conversion rate compared to other digital advertising strategies, which could make a powerful difference in restaurant marketing ROI and acquiring new guests.
Lookalike Campaigns for Google and Facebook
Creating lookalike campaigns on Google and Facebook is a relatively simple strategy. You export your list of guest data to Google or Facebook. Then, these platforms will begin creating a list of other people who match the characteristics of those in your list.
A lookalike campaign takes an audience of existing guests and finds a whole load of new guests in the same demographics with similar tastes. The idea is that these people are also likely to enjoy your service. Likewise, a good percentage of them will become loyal guests themselves.
Once your lookalike audience has been created with a service like Facebook or Google Ads, your targeted marketing ads will be served to this new audience. A successful lookalike campaign could unlock an entirely new market of guests similar to those who already love your restaurant.
And the key to creating a good one is to know your own guests as well as possible.
4. Discover Bloom Intelligence – Your Guests Will Love You For It
If you are ready to start building your own powerful online ordering marketing strategies, we hope these tips will help.
Bloom Intelligence now integrates with Olo and Oracle’s Gloriafood online ordering platforms. If you’re ready to start maximizing your marketing ROI, let us show you how.
Click here for a free demo of the product, or call us at 727-877-8181 and get ready to taste marketing success!
.svg)