5 Tactics To Motivate Off-Premise Dining

The emergence of services like GrubHub and Uber Eats over the last few years has completely transformed the way consumers dine. The appeal is apparent -- convenience, value, and speed. Using Amazon’s 1-click ordering, hungry consumers can repeat their previous orders within seconds and have their food favorites delivered to their door within the hour.

To compete, marketers across Quick-Service, Fast Casual and Casual Dining restaurants need to adapt to take a seat at the table by either adding themselves onto these leading 3rd party platforms and/or build their own digital ordering capabilities themselves. For example, McDonald’s offers both options – the ability to order delivery via Uber Eats, along with “Order Ahead” which allows customers to skip the line, pay ahead of time, and pick up when they want. Easy. Investing in this strategy is becoming increasingly necessary to survive in the digital convenience world and while the initial monetary investment is significant, the payoff could be huge.

Most marketers we work with understand the need to introduce and drive aggressive adoption of off-premise dining. Many experience similar dilemmas along the customer funnel as they embark on these new investments. These include:

• Getting it right is difficult -- creating a well designed and easy-to-navigate ordering experience
• Driving initial adoption and trial at scale (changing the way consumers dine and order)
• Limiting “1 and done” users
• Motivating users to earn and redeem their first reward (tied to loyalty ordering)

There’s good news – below are 5 easy to execute tactics leading marketers can leverage to fix various lifecycle stages across the off-premise funnel.

Idea 1: Capture new off-premise dining users through social advocacy from existing owned channels such as email, social, SMS, and mobile app.

• Execute lightweight referral campaigns where existing users can easily share their enthusiasm for the mobile app seamlessly across Facebook, SMS, and email. Provide an added incentive; exclusive rewards for those who do so that are redeemable within the mobile app exclusively.

Idea 2: Leverage urgency-driven offers that are redeemable via mobile app exclusively.

• Launch lightweight campaigns “at random” where the first 5,000 to claim an offer receive the offer. These campaigns can be strategically timed around key consideration events such as lunch, dinner, or weekend visits. 

Idea 3: Infuse educational information about the benefits to your mobile off-premise ordering capabilities.

• Motivate participants within the app or separate digital experiences (microsite) to learn more about the benefits to your ordering platform while participating in a set of rewards. Grant participants an advantage or higher offers for completing quizzes or key activities such as saving a favorite order, completing a profile, or adding a credit card. 

Idea 4: Target “one-and-done” customers who have not made a second purchase yet with time sensitive offers that expire soon.

• Trigger automated campaigns shortly after a 1st purchase is completed where an offer is available but expires within hours or days. Add additional urgency by reducing the value of the offer as time goes by without redemption.
  

Idea 5: Surprise & Delight your most loyal and active customers.

• Test a variety of offer strategies and measure results across the funnel. Keep your top 20 percent of users satisfied with these surprise events. Allow them to share with a friend to drive new adoption.  
  

These tactics can be lightweight, easy to execute, and drive meaningful results. Leveraging these urgency-driven tactics can complement existing marketing strategies and produce results within weeks that include:

• Up to a 5x reduction of mobile app acquisition costs
• 15-25% lift in offer redemption compared to offers across other channels
• 1-3X response rates vs. existing lapsed customer strategies
• Up to a 2X increase in weekly mobile app downloads
• Up to a 3x increase in first mobile app orders

The numbers alone should satisfy your hunger for growth and competitive advantage, but would it also satisfy your marketing tastebuds if almost all of the work was done for you? Click below to read about everything you can do with Quikly and contact us because we’d love to share a short demo and some ideas on how to make your customer interactions exciting and memorable.