Best Delivery Apps for Restaurants

Both before covid and during the first wave, we had the opportunity to work with different restaurants, delivery services and cafes. This experience made me think about what allows the restaurant business to stay afloat, and what to do for those who want not only to survive, but also to make money. Here's our resume with tips for restaurant owners.

1. Make a website (and delivery)

The first thing that we noticed - and were surprised, because now is the 21st century - was the lack of websites for some restaurants. In conditions of lockdown (and not only), this is a big disadvantage: while people order from competitors, these guys will have to make up the Best Delivery App for Restaurants.

Most people still have a website, but it serves as a business card: you can read a little about the restaurant itself, maybe see the menu, but nothing can be ordered. Naturally, at this moment the client goes to competitors or aggregators (which, in fact, are the same competitors).

If you have not yet organized the delivery infrastructure (menu management, couriers and delivery, analytics), this problem can be solved simply: use the services of third-party services, as, for example, Pizza Mia did - they use Smartomato.

Even at the most basic tariff there is everything to carry out delivery and conduct analytics - for a start, this is enough. Another option is Mobile app for restaurant ordering.

The only problem with third-party services is that there you cannot quickly redesign and make changes, you have to wait for the initiative from the creators.

Then, when you have time and money, you should pay more attention to the site: hire a programmer and UX designer to integrate your delivery system. This is necessary in order to make the site more user-friendly: the simpler and more intuitive the customer's path on the site, the higher the conversion.

2. Connect analytics

Tools such as Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics allow you to better understand who your target audience is, how it behaves on your website, what it needs and what it lacks. With analytics, you can track traffic sources and measure the effectiveness of your actions.

So, for Pizza Mia, we installed Google Analytics, set up goals - the actions of visitors that were important to us (usually visiting a specific page, clicking a button, paying for an order, etc.), put down utm-tags that show with what announcement the order came from.

Pizza Mia can now track which advertising channels and which ads brought in the most orders, invest in the most successful ads, and get new customers.

3. Let's advertise!

Including for a brand query (this is when people search for your name in search engines).

Like they state in the post concerning the Restaurant App ordering system, until you use advertising by brand, aggregators actively exploit it, taking a commission from your order in the amount of 28-35%, or your customers are taken by competitors.

The first month of working with Pizza Mia, we successfully ran contextual advertising, it added traffic to the site. In the second month, the so-called cannibalization of traffic began: branded advertising began to block the organic (that is, free) influx of SEO results, so we turned it off. This happens when your brand is already known: in general, it's not a big deal if you have a budget. If you want to save money, you need to monitor this and remove intersections.

It's clear with contextual advertising, but what about targeting? It’s quite simple with him: the advantage of the restaurant industry is that you don’t have to think about the offer for a long time - a good photo of an appetizing dish and an apt description is enough for a person to become interested, go to your profile on social networks or to a website, and place an order.

How we calculated the conversion (We will not show the numbers - let it remain a secret of the client - but we will explain it on the fingers).

Since people often do not leave an order right from the first advertising visit to the site (we drove traffic directly to the menu), but then return on their own, we caught them using a pixel. Pixel is a tool that allows you to work with your ad audience. It collects anonymous identifiers (mobile app or user's browser ID) of users who have seen your banners.

Without the pixel, measuring the effectiveness of advertising would not reflect reality: we would only count those people who came from the advertisement to the site and immediately placed an order. Thanks to the pixel, we also took into account those who entered the site from the advertisement, remembered Jay, after a while returned and made an order.

conclusions There is nothing difficult about going digital little by little: there are many tools available that you need to pick up and use. And even if the second full lockdown does not happen, digitalization is inevitable, and the sooner you start it, the higher your survival ability will be. If you have neglected some advertising channels before, think about it: most likely, you are giving customers and money to competitors.