Welcome back to our summer series intended to help restaurants of all kinds beat the infamous summer slump so many restaurant owners have come to dread over the years. Our goal is to provide our clients, prospective clients, and even the odd restaurateur surfing the web in order to find some tips, with some practical pointers to help them not only stay above water during the late summer, but to have these months become some of the most profitable of the year!
Throughout this series, we’ll oscillate between speaking about what restaurants can do from a more general perspective and keying on mobile food ordering systems for restaurants — the latter of which just so happens to be our specialty. The reason for this is simple; we believe in what we do and the products we offer. We are passionate about helping restaurants from all over get the digital facelift they need (while adding a host of other features and services) to rocket them into the world of sophisticated online ordering systems. It’s no secret that the past five to ten years have seen more change in the way folks order food for pickup and delivery than ever before. If you are a restaurant that is serious about competing in the all-important online sector, you need to be able to adapt to how hungry consumers are looking for their next meal.
Online Ordering Systems And Consumer Behavior
As J. Patrick Doyle, President & CEO of Domino’s, observes about adding an online ordering system back in 2010, “Everything about the online transaction is better. The frequency of orders is higher. Customer satisfaction is higher. The average ticket is higher — they will buy more food when they order online.” Upon Domino’s implementation of online ordering, they’ve grown to become the world’s second-largest pizza chain.
Convenience Matters
But here’s our point: Doyle’s observations ring true. The consumer behavior he describes don’t happen in a vacuum. We know this because we see consistent growth across a wide range of restaurant types — not just pizza chains or primarily “takeout” restaurants. Indeed, the average ticket is higher, order accuracy is improved, and customer satisfaction is better as well. When your customers have the chance to peruse your menu at their leisure, as opposed to staring at a physical menu with hungry, impatient folks waiting in line behind them at your physical restaurant, they can find exactly what they were looking for — and usually a few upsell items they weren’t! To quantify this, online orders are, on average, 20 to 30 percent larger than those placed in person or over the phone.
The convenience element of online ordering is only one piece of the pie, what we are discussing above, but it’s something worth considering. What’s more, millennials probably won’t give you the time of day unless you have a robust online food ordering system that is easy to use. There are north of 50 million millennials in the country, making them the largest generation in the nation’s history. Obviously, their typical behavior is worth considering. While ruminating on that fact, here’s another: 2017 saw the percentage of restaurant orders received online was greater than the quantity placed over the phone. The world is changing, and we have to adapt to our new environment, or otherwise.
Customer Data And Marketing Efforts
Choosing Online Orders Now gets you access to a wide range of features and benefits. From our general ease-of-use to our non-exclusivity policy which allows our clients to use whichever food delivery provider you’d like to, we do our best to propel our customers toward dramatically improved profitability.
One of the ways in which our online ordering software for restaurants helps our clients out is in our capacity to capture invaluable customer data from those who order online. Depending on your wishes, we can set up our food ordering system checkout to require a name, address, email address, and zip code in order to complete an order. As you are likely aware, being able to capture this information affords you the ability to send them special promotions in outbound email campaigns alongside traditional mail marketing efforts. You can even integrate this customer information with your POS, where it is automatically sent and stored in your system with each order that comes through. We offer sophisticated solutions, but we make it intuitive and simple at the same time!
Get Your Restaurant Website A Facelift
Our departing thought concerns websites, and how they are not unlike cars in one key way — if you don’t tend to them with the odd tune-up every six months to a year, eventually they’ll stop being able to serve their purpose. Restaurant websites, like many other industries, need to be updated, both cosmetically and functionally. It’s not enough to simply slap a menu up there and hope someone calls your phone number. Site speed, dynamic imagery, and offering promotions are all integral to what the modern consumer expects to see.
Of course, no number of oil changes and tune-ups will keep your car running forever — eventually you’ll need a new model. Getting passed up by the equivalent of an Audi or Porsche while you cruise down the Autobahn going 25 MPH in your Model T doesn’t sound like very much fun. In the same way, Online Orders Now offers modern, robust functionality to help your site look great, no matter if it is being viewed on a tablet, desktop computer, or smartphone. For a more detailed list of what our custom restaurants have to offer, you can view our description linked above.
View A Demo Today!
To see a range of restaurant websites we’ve designed, you can check out our demos at your convenience. If you are interested in learning about which POS system providers we integrate with, such information is available on our POS Integrations and Partnerships resource. Keep in mind we offer fully-integrated, semi-integrated, and non-integrated options. So no matter what your setup currently looks like, we have the ability to adapt to it. Be sure to keep an eye out for more posts in this series, in which we’ll continue to offer suggestions to help make your restaurant not merely succeed, but thrive!