Boost Your Restaurant’s Delivery Sales: 5 Marketing Tips And One Big Secret!

The online food delivery market in the United Arab Emirates reached $651 Million in 2023, and it is expected to reach $1,625 Million by 2032, with a growth rate of 10.70%. Driven by consumers’ preference for convenience, a trend that has been accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the rising popularity of the delivery services, this market has become more competitive than ever. It is up to every food and beverage (F&B) business to utilize the delivery services to their advantage in order to maximize the power of delivery services to boost profitability.

In this article, we’ll explore five effective marketing strategies that restaurateurs can use to boost their delivery sales. And be sure to read all the way to the end, where we’ll reveal one big secret to increase your restaurant’s delivery revenue.

Five Marketing Tips to Boost Your Restaurant Delivery Sales

Optimize Your Online Presence

Optimizing your online presence means keeping your digital platforms updated and ensuring a smooth user experience. For any F&B business, online presence includes your website, social media accounts, mobile apps, and third-party delivery platforms. These should all have up-to-date menus, accurate pricing, and high-quality images that make your food look appealing.

Optimizing your online presence means applying certain improvement processes, specific to each digital platform. The purpose is to better highlight the brand and increase the potential of reaching more of its targeted audience.  For your website, this means using clear, high-quality images, highlighting top promotions, and featuring delivery options prominently on the homepage. It should also be optimized with the right keywords – ones that your target customers are likely searching for. Finally, your website must be mobile-friendly. This means it needs to load fast, have properly displayed images, readable text, and easy navigation, no matter the device.

Updating and optimizing your presence on third-party delivery apps can be tricky, though. If you’ve used these platforms before, you know the hassle of manually updating promotions, menu items, or prices on each one. Logging into different apps to make changes can lead to errors and wasted time, which affects your business. With a strong restaurant ERP system like Polaris ERP, you can make all updates in one place. With just one click, everything syncs across all platforms, ensuring that your menu, prices, and promotions are consistent everywhere.

Power Up Your Social Media Promotions

Your social media platforms – Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, etc. – should tell your restaurant’s story every day. The key is to be present where your audience spends their time. Depending on your geographical location, certain platforms may be more popular than others. While in Europe Facebook and Instagram are the preferred social media platforms, in the Gulf area TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are favored. Likewise, the targeted audience might prefer specific platforms. For example, Gen Z tends to favor TikTok and Instagram. Baby Boomers or Gen X, who might be more interested in fine dining, are more active on Facebook. Make sure your restaurant is on the platforms that matter most to your target audience, in the region where your business operates.

Your promotions across delivery channels need to be clearly communicated via your social media platforms, so that your community becomes aware of what you’re offering. In addition, the graphics or videos used to present your promotions need to be enticing, to spark interest and desire.

You can also grow your community by offering rewards or vouchers to customers who tag their friends in posts. When they tag others, their friends will see your promotions too, helping you reach a wider audience and attract more potential customers.

Implement Loyalty Programs. Make Them UGC

A sustainable tactic to encourage repeat ordering, as well as to keep your customers satisfied, is to offer loyalty rewards for delivery orders. These can take various forms, such as:

• Bonus points that can unlock free menu items
• Higher discounts, depending on the accumulated points
• Free items, when reaching a certain amount of ordered items
• Exclusive promotions and / or giveaways like mugs, t-shirts, hats, etc.

Taking this action a step further, you can ask your clients to take selfies with the rewards they received (the free menu items, giveaways, etc.), and share them on their social media accounts, tagging your business, to unlock further benefits of the loyalty program. With this user generated content (UGC), you preserve your brand’s authenticity, and engage in a natural communication with your customers. 

Polaris ERP can make this easy for you, categorizing your customers into segments based on how often they are ordering, and how much they are spending. This can really streamline your loyalty program, helping you develop a personalized communication and engagement strategy with your customers that will further spur your delivery orders value.

Collaborate with Food Delivery Apps

Food delivery apps like Careem, Talabat, Noon, and UberEats often promote special offers, deals, and discounts on their platforms. These apps usually have a section at the top of the page dedicated to “offers of the day,” which feature discounts from partner restaurants and other food businesses.

Building a good relationship with the account manager for each platform you use is key. They can help you get your offers featured in this promotional section. Make sure your ad banners clearly show the discount and include a high-quality image of the dish you’re promoting.

But the potential for collaboration doesn’t stop there. You can also highlight special discounts for first-time customers or set up a loyalty program through the delivery app. You can offer customized rewards based on how often customers order or how much they spend.

With custom audience targeting, you can run campaigns aimed at specific customer groups, tailoring the message and the offer to fit their interests. You can even adjust the timing of the campaigns to optimize results.

While there’s much more to consider when working with third-party delivery apps, the easiest way to manage it all is with restaurant software. Polaris ERP directly connects with all major delivery platforms, so your promotions will be automatically displayed across all channels, saving you time and boosting your profitability from this sales channel.

You can use both your own channels and the delivery apps’ platforms to promote time-limited offers. These can be shared through pop-up banners on your website, social media posts like Reels or Shorts, client testimonials, user-generated content, or email marketing. By emphasizing the limited time frame, along with any discounts for delivery orders, you’ll create a sense of urgency and encourage customers to act quickly.

Additionally, you can work with your delivery partners to feature these time-limited promotions as part of their special campaigns for holidays like Christmas, Eid, or Halloween. This way, your offers get extra visibility during key periods.

One Big Secret to Boost Your Restaurant Delivery Sales

We’ve built up to this point by showing how a restaurant ERP software can be the key to boosting your business and maximizing your delivery sales. To be more specific, there are certain features that can directly work towards this goal.

Restaurant Analytics Software

Polaris ERP’s restaurant analytics software provides real-time insights on every aspect of your business, such as sales, accounting, purchase, inventory, and more. For sales, the system offers a deep dive into all sales channels, including delivery platforms. 

You can easily track sales from each delivery platform and see customer preferences and order patterns. This helps you understand how to adjust your strategy to boost delivery orders. For example, if you notice that a large number of orders come in between 2:00 and 4:00 pm on a specific platform, you could offer a 5-10% discount during that time to increase sales.

Additionally, Polaris ERP provides an overview of all your branches’ performance. This way, you can see how delivery orders are performing across the business. The software shows you which menu items are popular and which branches are performing well or struggling. If some branches are underperforming, you can make informed decisions to rectify this. For instance, you can offer higher discounts or feature exclusive menu items for delivery to drive more orders.

Menu Engineering

Polaris ERP allows you to see in real time what are the best selling menu items across various branches. More than this, it shows you what individual menu items are ordered together most often. 

For instance, a shawarma is often ordered with a salad. You can easily see this information in the menu combo analysis report by Polaris Technology. With this knowledge at your fingertips, you can create a special combos. Next, you will promote it through an enticing design across all, or selected branches, where data shows it might be a hit.

Managing delivery sales is often a frustrating, but necessary process. Integrating with diverse delivery platforms can be a headache and result in wasted time and human errors, but most importantly, in lost business potential or customers. When using a restaurant ERP, all delivery apps are already integrated into the system, and connected with the POS, hence all updates and promotions are automatically synchronized. Plus, with Polaris ERP, you can use your data analytics and menu insights to design promotions and combos that will help boost your delivery sales.

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