Why do bars, cafes, and restaurants need mobile apps? In fact, there are hundreds of thousands of companies that simply need this technology, and restaurants are no exception. But how do you apply the power of mobile apps to solve the marketing challenges of the restaurant business?
Exploring the incredible variety of food in Bethesda can make for a delightful experience, but it’s important not to overlook the convenience and benefits that come with using a restaurant app to streamline your dining plans.
First, you need to understand what goal the restaurant sets for itself as part of its delivery app development. To interact with existing customers and attract new ones, to make sales, or to insulate the audience? Or maybe the restaurant needs a comprehensive strategy for using delivery apps in business? That’s what our article will talk about.
Effective Features
Speaking of functionality, it’s important to learn how to use these features correctly, because having a delivery app isn’t yet the solution to all business problems. It’s just a tool that helps a company interact effectively with its customers.
- Contacts. This is the most essential function of every business application. For restaurants, it’s just a must-have, because, with the contacts function, you can not just find out the phone number and address of the restaurant, but also create a route to the restaurant, and call directly from the delivery app to the restaurant.
- The menu is also an important component. As statistics show, 70-80% of restaurant visitors turn to the menu to study offers and prices before visiting any establishment. Therefore, you should satisfy this need of customers by familiarizing them with the prices and menu of the restaurant in advance, so that it won’t be a surprise later.
- Loyalty. A loyalty program is a major tool for paying customers and bringing them back again and again. The fact that a loyalty program ties a customer to a company by bringing them back again and again is a fact. Loyalty programs also replace everyone’s usual bonus cards that people are forced to carry around.
- Geo-coupons are a terrific feature that allows you to create coupons that are valid for customers in a specific location, such as the establishment itself. That is, to take advantage of the bonus, you need to visit the restaurant a given number of times and get your bonus. Thus, the number of visits to the restaurant increases dramatically, because people love discounts, bonuses, and nice offers.
- Push notifications are the most powerful technology today that few people use. Push notifications are special messages that appear on the smartphone screen of all users. Push notifications can be sent to periodically remind customers about themselves, and inform them about promotions, parties, or updated menus.
- Website. This feature allows you to embed a website into the delivery app shell, as well as social media accounts if the company uses them for business.
- Reservation/booking. The restaurant reservations feature helps customers choose a convenient day and time to visit without the burden of calling the company. Also, when a customer calls a restaurant, the phones may be busy and the customer won’t come back, because people like simple solutions. It’s much more effective to provide an opportunity to make a reservation at a restaurant without having to call.
- Dinner reservations. If the restaurant deals with the delivery of ready-made meals at home or in offices, then this function will become an indispensable assistant, because it gives customers the opportunity to order directly from the delivery app without the need to search for the company website or call the firm.
- The gallery allows you to post beautiful sales photos of your favorite dishes and motivate people to visit the institution or make an order from the delivery app.
- The information tab helps to create various multilevel catalogs and publish useful content. In this tab, you can place recipes from the chef or introduce customers to the entire staff of the restaurant, which will cause even more confidence in the company.
- Tip Calculation — calculate how much to leave depending on the % of tips and the cost of the dinner.
- Events — this tab will help to inform customers about events, show the route, and where they will take place. The user can leave comments here and mark that they plan to visit a particular event.
- Form — a function that creates various forms of feedback. It can be used to get real feedback and suggestions from customers to improve service and maintenance. And thanks to this feature, you can also make reservations or take-home orders.
- Direct calls help customers quickly contact the restaurant, for example, if they need to reschedule a table. You don’t have to waste time searching for contact information online or in the city directory to make a call. You can make a call with just 2 buttons.
- Competently configured functions and usability (user-friendliness) do not solve all problems. It is important to use the app intelligently in implementing marketing campaigns to attract customers and motivate them to take certain actions.
Marketing Promotions Delivery App
The most important thing to start with is to decide on the purpose of specific promotions. Below we will give you some examples that can easily be applied to the restaurant business.
Attracting customers
Suppose the purpose of the promotion is to attract customers and increase the number of installations. In that case, you can do the following: offer each visitor to the restaurant to install a delivery app in exchange for a 10% discount on their dinner. This will prove to be a nice bonus for each visitor. And the restaurant will get an opportunity not to part with the customer, but to continue interacting with them further through push notifications.
Another example is running a promotion that will give people a great setup bonus and allow the restaurant to attract new customers who participate in the loyalty program.
Retention of existing customers
If the purpose of the marketing campaign is to shake up existing customers, you can offer them a connection to a new loyalty program, which the restaurant will develop especially for them and offer new interesting conditions.
You can periodically send push notifications with useful content, such as recipes from the chef or advice on “What to cook for Valentine’s Day loved ones” and so on. You can inform customers about new dishes and invite customers to try new dishes, as well as just congratulate them on holidays or invite them to business lunches.
Sending push notifications will allow you to constantly interact with customers and warm relations with them, periodically inviting them to the restaurant.
Increased sales
Since push notifications have such a cool feature as geo-targeting, you need to take full advantage of this. Or set up push notifications not to send to everyone at lunchtime, but only to customers who are in nearby office buildings, inviting them to a business lunch.
So, a delivery app for a restaurant is not just a newfangled gimmick that developers offer. but a real working tool that can increase sales and, most importantly, make customers fall in love with your restaurant forever.
