Restaurants often find themselves caught up in a race as the fast-commerce revolution continues to sweep the Food and Beverage industry. In this pandemic, where the world relies on digitalization, getting orders without any pause is crucial for any business to progress.
The way customers are ordering food is drastically changing with time. Businesses can no longer open up a restaurant and wait for customers to show up and knock on the door.
It is time for them to find their customers, keep them engaged, and retain them forever. With tweaks in the way, your businesses interact with customers and offer services; it is possible to shoot up your sales even in this pandemic.
Whether your business is just getting started or struggling to survive in these challenging times, we got you covered. Here is the curated list of 10 steps to attract more customers and retain old ones for your food business.
After following these tips, you can witness an increase in orders placed by customers.
Reward your loyal customers for counting on you
You will be surprised to know the cost to get a new customer is 4.8 times more than to get repeat food orders from existing/old ones.
It makes sense since getting the first order from a new customer needs a lot of effort to build trust.
On the other hand, existing customers are more likely to place orders without giving much thought.
Since they are much aware of your quality of service, they are an asset to your business.
Your business can make the best use of cashbacks and similar loyalty programs to shoot up the customer retention rate.
Switching to cashback offers to customers costs less for your business than offering fancy flat discounts.
Integration of Facebook Pixel into a digital menu to build a virtual audience
Let’s say 70% of your customers visit your restaurant, glance at your menu, and place their orders. After a while, they just leave. It is annoying for your business, right?
It happens the same with digital menus too. Most of your customers just browse your menu and bounce back without placing orders.
What if you can find a solution to convert those random visitors into paying customers?
Integrating Facebook Pixel with our Twerlo digital menu can help you track customer behavior and help to build a solid audience.
Use a solid network of influencers and bloggers
We get it. The massive network of any influencer to promote your service works like magic.
But how can you track leads from those influencers? How many steps your customer needs to take before placing an order?
Ever thought about it?
Well, keep your worries away as CLIP attached to their profiles can track down orders coming through their network.
It will provide much clarity to your business about the number of leads rushing from the influencers who were signed up to promote your business.
Besides, this data will be helpful to create marketing campaigns for your business too.
Unified ordering experience
You might have already invested in many social media platforms –WhatsApp, official website, Facebook, or Instagram.
Although your brand or business might be doing good in each one of these platforms, you need to be proactive while using them.
If these platforms lose their touch in near future, then redirecting your customers gets messy. Moreover, it takes forever to get back your lost customers, right?
So, save your business by giving out a unified online ordering experience.
It helps to increase conversions and redirect/switch customers to other platforms.
Keep social media channels updated
If there is anything your customer does all day, it has to be checking their social media profiles!
Thus, the active social media presence of your business can surely shoot up the conversion rate.
Besides, your followers are more likely to order as your brands keep showing up in their feed.
Promoting your service by catching up with trends is an easy way to keep customers glued to your service too.
In fact, some of the best brands in the food industry leverage the power of social media to keep their audience engaged with their services.
Add a touch of personalization to your website to drive food orders
Restaurants are no longer limiting themselves to providing services. In fact, they are taking an extra mile to build or engage customers with their food.
Instead of promoting service, they make sure to interact with their customers through a personalized message on a website or other channels.
Maybe, bring a smile or make customers laugh with their personalized message or a tagline too.
Personalization leaves a lasting memory on customers. Thus, whenever they wish to order, your business name pops up in their head.
It makes them feel as if your brand is actually interacting with them on a personal level.
You can shoot up your automated order taking through your website by introducing an ordering widget.
Compared to some fancy promotions, this one provokes your customer to take action without losing a minute.
Customer feedback matters
We know it. Feedback can be a tough pill to digest for any business. If we think about it, feedback can be the best parameter to measure the success of your service.
Who is a better judge of your service than your own customer, right?
It is not easy to seek manual help from your staff as they are involved in other tasks. Besides, there is always some room for inaccuracy with human staff as feedback data might vary.
Thus, an automated feedback system can be a savior here. It can help to get deeper insights into your service or product.
When reviews are not helping you out, direct interaction with customers can be the best road to take. How about offering them an amazing discount to keep them glued to your products?
A happy customer is more likely to share a positive review over Google upon request. It will help your website to scale up in the search results. Your restaurant online can take a leap and keep your competitors away through this strategy.
Add automation to your service
As a business owner, it is not easy to manage all tasks and keep your customer happy all the time. Sometimes, you might have to give up some tasks to attend to urgent ones.
Answering each question of customers can be a herculean task for your staff too. In such cases, a chatbot can be helpful for automated order taking and can save your business from going into the abyss.
A messenger or WhatsApp chatbot can be used to address 90% of customer queries or questions.
Thus, your team can focus their time and energy on critical tasks while answering basic questions is taken care of by bots.
Adapt with time
Ever since the pandemic started, visitors ditched the dine-in experience and now prefer to go for online food ordering. Thanks to delivery solutions, you don’t have to miss out on your customers due to challenging times.
Customers can easily order food online and you retain your customers for a longer time.
Make the best use of digital menus to let customers place orders from the comfort of their homes.
Post pandemic, you can offer some loyalty points to those customers who would make an effort for a dine-in experience.
Don’t get caught up in getting new customers and forget to retain existing ones with new tweaks in the way service is offered.
Word-of-mouth never gets old
Call it old-school but the word of mouth still has a charm of its own in marketing. Yes, it never gets old.
If you want maximum returns but prefer to be on a tight budget on your marketing strategy, word-of-mouth is the answer.
Your existing customers can be your best marketing tool if they are rewarded for promoting your product.
If your loyal customers share a good review about your business with their network, you can expect a flood of leads coming your way.
At the end of every order, you can offer them some rewards for sharing a good word about your business.
There you go, you get new customers with little effort and money spent on promotion.
Save money by teaming up with Twerlo
Since it is a bumpy ride for restaurant businesses in this pandemic, saving money is more crucial now than ever.
Your food business cannot risk spending the hard-earned money on trivial things.
It is well known that food delivery apps or hunger stations are always up to get their commission right from the pockets of customers.
But what if you can skip them and get those extra bucks for your business? It will be great, right?
Reach out to customers directly through Twerlo without relying much on the service of Zomato or Hungerstation.
Moreover, you can have insights about customer behavior while ordering food and build trust among them by giving out impeccable service.
Seek the expertise of Twerlo and take your food business to new heights!
