Food is the first thing that comes to everyone’s mind regardless of whether they are happy, sad, alone, or in a gathering. In the old tradition, ordering food was luxurious, but since technology has touched the sky and people have started working on making the restaurant and food industry more commercial, people have started ordering food online more than usual.
When the competition has become so high, and every individual is busy promoting online ordering of their restaurant, it has become more chaotic than ever. But if you use an online food ordering system for a restaurant to give your customer ease and experience, you are still in the competition. But it would be best if you implemented some powerful promotional tactics to help you stand out and get the top position in the market. To make your search easy for powerful approaches, we bring the 10 most influential and effective tricks and tips that will help you to boost your online ordering system. Let’s dive in!
What is an Online Ordering System, & Why is it Important?
An online ordering system is an automated software that lets consumers order products and services online. In marketing terms, an online ordering system is a platform that promotes online ordering from the comfort of your home and couch. It typically involves a website or mobile app that allows customers to browse products, check and select items and submit payment to complete information.
Online food ordering system is important for several reasons:
- The first thing that makes it a favorite of customers and businesses is convenience. It lets the customer book orders from anywhere, anytime, without effort.
- Efficiency is the second most important aspect that benefits business as it streamlines the order fulfilment process by automating tasks, including processing, management, and payment handling.
- Improved Sales Rate is another benefit businesses can achieve with the online ordering system as it helps expand business reach without limiting it to specific demographics.
- Any business that believes in the supremacy of customers in making the business successful will never leave any chance to provide an excellent customer experience to its customer. This is where an online ordering system plays the role of profitable companions that promote the best online customer experience.
Although there are many more benefits of using an online ordering system, the benefits discussed above are the most considerable.
10 Tips to Boost Your Online Ordering System
Online food ordering has become the backbone of businesses that want to accelerate their reach and sales rate.
The 10 actionable tips that will help you achieve these goals are:
1. Use Advance Channels
The three most effective channels that can empower you to entice your customers and persuade them to make orders from your restaurants play the most important role in boosting your online ordering system for restaurants. These three channels are:
Social Media
The above statistics show that using social media to promote online ordering can be beneficial as it caters to a mass audience. It will be good for restaurants to focus on promoting online ordering by sharing updates related to their restaurant on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms. You can also promote your product by sharing the information with pictures on your social media accounts so more people will get info about your product.
Other activities that you can perform to promote the online ordering system on social media are:
- Host a social media contest
- Collaborate with influencers
- Share customer reviews and testimonials
- Use hashtags
- Post regularly
Email Marketing
Email marketing is also an effective channel to boost your online restaurant ordering system. It helps you to increase awareness, promote special offers, and develop customer loyalty. By designing targeted email campaigns, you can target a wider audience and inform them about your online ordering system, like its convenience and benefits.
Also, you can promote your exclusive offers through emails to encourage customers to order online and save time and money. The consistency of engaging with customers through email helps you build a strong bond with your customers and ensure their loyalty to you. Overall, email marketing is one of the strongest channels that can be used to promote online ordering.
Other Channels
Along with social media and email marketing, the other channels that can be used to promote online ordering are SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging. All these channels are the best way to communicate with customers and remind them to order using your online food ordering system.
2. Offers Exclusive Discounts & Coupons
Offering customers exclusive discounts and coupons is also a powerful approach to boost an online restaurant ordering system. Giving customers special offers not available for the general public puts a sense of exclusivity and incentive in them and influences them to place an order.
You create a discount code that can only be used when orders are made online, or to appreciate your repetitive customer loyalty, you can create a loyalty program through which you can reward customers through special discounts. To implement exclusive discounts and loyalty programs, you can use plugins like myCred that help you reward your customers easily. Also, this time-to-time discount and coupon offer can be a valuable tool for driving more orders through your online ordering.
3. Use Visuals & Illustration
Visual marketing is a thing that holds the power to influence the masses in this digital era. It acts as a digital billboard that persuades customers to at least give your product or service one try. Similarly, in the case of online ordering, when you share illustrations and visuals of your tempting dishes or specialities on your website or social channels, you are playing the biggest part of marketing that somehow brings customers to your website to place an order.
Along with your product visuals, you can also share or promote your special deals and discounts through graphical banners to advertise them. Overall, illustrations and visuals enhance the user experience and increase customer engagement and satisfaction.
4. Effective and Easy Checkout Process
When placing an order, the one thing that customers want is an easy and quick checkout process. It should be optimized for mobile to ensure your checkout process is effective and quick. Also, provide independence in completing checkout with minimal steps. Effective and easy checkout can help promote your online ordering system. If your current website lacks a convenient and secure checkout process, use a reliable restaurant website builder that offers customization options, allowing you to design an easily navigable checkout for customers.
Here are a few ways that you can use to make the checkout process easy and simple:
- Offer multiple payment options
- Allow autofill
- Guest checkout
- Minimize distractions
- Remove surprise costs and fees
- Display security badges
5. Optimize Your Menu
Menu optimization can also be the best approach to promote online food ordering systems. The more your menu is clear, easy to navigate, and visually appealing, the chances are the more order you will receive. Also, providing an easy menu encourages customers to place orders, accelerating revenue.
The few approaches you can use to optimize your menu are:
- Categorize menu items
- Choose attractive layout
- Use high-resolution photos
- Give a complete description of each item
- Display pricing in bold
- Highlight popular choice
- Show customer reviews
- Use suggestive selling
6. Keep Track of Performance
Have you ever thought about what would happen if you don’t keep track of your performance? Imagine you are putting all the effort into boosting your online ordering system for a restaurant, but you still need to achieve your desired goals. It’s all because you were busy implementing and forgot to detect loopholes, which eventually failed.
So to truly thrive in the market, businesses must keep track of performance. Tracking performance may include conversion rates, click-through rates, and customer engagement metrics which support businesses in detecting the improvement areas in the online food ordering system. Also, tracking data helps to optimize campaigns and make data-driven decisions to ensure excellent customer experience.
7. 0% Shipping Fee on Orders
Offering free- shipping to charging a minimum amount equal to none can also help you promote online food ordering systems. Food ordering with free shipping is the best way to attract more customers that can easily take your conversion bar high. When you give this advantage to your online customers, it also encourages them to order more and more and become loyal customers.
Also, customers appreciate when they feel you are not financially burdening them, leading to excellent customer satisfaction and experience.
8. Offer Easy Reordering
Convenience is the first thing that every business offers to their client. Reordering is also counted as the main aspect of ensuring convenience for customers.
When customers like your product, they mostly reorder those things or others, but while reordering, if they need to follow everything from scratch, chances are high that they abandon the cart instead of reordering. So businesses must ensure easy reordering as it will help you boost your online ordering system for restaurants and unlock many customer benefits like effective customization, order accuracy, saving time, and bulk ordering.
9. Display Pricing Clearly
To boost your online ordering system, you must consider displaying clear pricing. When customers visit your website or app to order, they should be able to find the pricing information easily, as it eliminates ambiguity and guarantees that customers are aware of the original price.
This transparency builds trust and supports you in setting a positive relationship with customers. Moreover, hidden privacy can trigger customers’ frustration, resulting in lost leads. So always show the complete pricing with products as customers appreciate businesses that are upfront and transparent about their pricing.
10. Provide Non-stop Customer Service
Suppose a customer reaches out to you for any query at odd hours, but your system still needs to be upgraded to provide 24/7 customer services; there is a strong possibility they can switch to your competitor.
You must ensure continuous customer support to provide a seamless and positive customer experience. By addressing customers’ concerns promptly, you show your commitment to their satisfaction and build trust.
Conclusion
Implementing an online ordering system is a simple element but boosting is. It would be best if you had powerful tactics to beat the competitors and get the top position, so to make everything easy for you, we leverage the combination of strategies that are not only powerful enough to promote the online ordering system but help you in optimizing your website ranking, give customers the best experience and improve your conversion rate.
FAQs
The easiest ways you can use to persuade customers to do online ordering are:
– Provide easy ways to make the orders
– Gives exclusive discounts and offers
– Advertise the product with different channels
– Display complete product information
– Give rewards to repetitive customers
The four effective ways to attract customers are:
– Identify Targeted customers
– Improve online presence
– Promote products & services
– Highlight online reviews and ratings
The easier the checkout process, the more sales the business can make. Some ways that let you make your checkout process easier for customers are:
– Simplify the checkout form
– Provide multiple payment options
– Enable guest checkout
– Use the progress bar
– Provide autofill option