People everywhere are mostly similar. Sometimes they just want to eat a nice burger, sushi, pasta, or steak meal while watching a movie and relaxing. The call for delivery is higher than any time ever, and your restaurant should be capable to provide it or will lose big time. All you need to do is market your delivery services, so everyone knows it and will use it
Producing a Plan for Delivery
If your restaurant doesn’t already offer delivery, it’s time to look at the possibility. Whether you serve the fastest of foods or the fanciest of meals, look for solutions to deliver your food.
A good place to start is measure interest in delivery services. If you have a good following on social media, or a strong email list, send a survey to your customers to tell you what they want. Find out where people interested in delivery live. This will help you asses if you would have enough demand within a reasonable delivery radius.
Then, figure out how you would do delivery. Would you hire your own delivery employees or partner with a third-party delivery company, like talabat or tawseel? Having your own employees means investing more money, but also requires you to have enough demand to pay for the delivery employee. Then, if you choose to hire employees, do you have them use their own vehicles, or get a company car — maybe one with a built-in heating tool to keep the food warm?
Starting Your Service
So now all the details of delivery service have been organized, it’s time to launch to the public. The objective here to reach as many people as you can to get the word out to have a great start. The more people are satisfied with your delivery and know about it, the more loyal customers you’ll generate.
So the best way is to organize an event around the launch of your delivery service. Let everyone knows that you have delivery service. Advertise it in your website, put ads in your local community spaces such as supermarket... Radio commercials on local radio are good to spread the word during busy hours. Post on social media for several days. Go big announcing it to everyone you can.
It is also worth giving customers extra motivation with special deals when ordering online during the launch week or month. Have discounts on your most popular items, offer free delivery.
Optimizing the Ordering
People use delivery services for different reasons, such as: looking to have party, order for hassle-free family dinner, a quick lunch, or just looking to eat delicious food while watching Netflix.
After that initial launch time where you are shooting to get everybody to try your delivery service, look at the data you’ve received. That includes order size, what time of day orders are made and delivered, where the food was delivered, and how often people order.
From that information, alongside your website’s data, you can piece together your delivery target markets. Maybe your food isn’t very viable for large parties like pizza is, so it wouldn’t make sense to target that market. On the flip side, maybe a lot of people are ordering singular meals at odd hours, meaning that maybe you have a strong market for people who like to eat your food alone in the comfort of their home. Do market research to identify ideal and new customers.
Once you’ve created an understanding of who is using your service, you start planning your marketing around that market. Finding that a lot of people order massive amounts of food for parties on Friday nights? Have promotions and advertising about using your delivery service to throw a great event.
Keeping Long-Term Customers
Just like with customers who eat inside your restaurant, part of keeping long-time customers with your delivery business is your service. One bad experience and they will never come back. One batch of cold food, one rude delivery man, and one wrong order— if anything goes wrong, people won’t risk delivery again.
A big part of the delivery experience is what to expect if something does go wrong. A prime example of this are the days when pizza companies had the “Delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free” promise. This is typically no longer the case, but that big marketing push gave customers a feeling that, no matter the result, they win by ordering delivery. Either they get their food extremely quickly or they get it for free.
While you don’t need to copy the “delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free” model, you need to do something to impress. Find something comparable to your business that will leave customers satisfied from ordering delivery.
Keeping your delivery service profitable is to include it in your marketing permanently. It’s not enough to simply have the option on your site. Keep people informed that you offer delivery for their convenience. Doing that will lead to long-term success and constantly creating returning customers.