Building your restaurant’s online presence is crucial in today’s market – it’s an essential element of brand building, bringing more customers in and increasing online orders, too. Whilst you’re likely aware of the benefits of social media, a blog is an often overlooked way to up your digital marketing game. From increasing your Google traffic to building a strong customer relationship, there are plenty of benefits to a blog.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving your website to help visibility on Google search results. Having new, dynamic content like a blog will help with this – a blog offers the opportunity to use keywords that may otherwise be tricky to shoehorn in, meaning people are more likely to come across your site.
Google favours sites that are updated regularly, which can otherwise be difficult to do on a restaurant site. Plus, a blog can include a call to action that will encourage visitors to order, so the traffic converts. Bonus points if Slerp is integrated – there can be a direct, fuss-free method for readers to order food right away.
This one is simple – engaging your customers and giving them more content around your restaurant is always a good idea. People are likely to share your content if they enjoy it, driving more traffic to you. It also gives you more content to share on your own socials – a win-win!
Show your customers what makes you special! Setting a brand tone of voice and sharing insights into your industry gives a personality to your restaurant, connecting with your customers. It also gives you authority in your industry.
Ready to take the leap? Get started with some of these ideas for blog topics:
Got an ever-evolving menu? Your blog is a great place to keep customers up-to-date about new dishes, seasonal offerings, and upcoming events. Nothing encourages people to try a dish like a mouth-watering description.
For the real foodies out there, you can deep-dive into the ins and outs of a spotlighted dish; talk about the inspiration, sourcing the ingredients, cooking techniques, and more.
Your blog shouldn’t just be about your restaurant – provide value with industry insights, info on seasonal eating, and other general topics. This is more likely to reach a wider audience.
Is there a trick to enjoying your food at its best? Create a blog that provides tips and tricks into reheating and serving your food. It sounds simple, but it might be helpful for readers to know.
Put a spotlight on your local community and write a round-up of your favorite food places in the area – including yourself, of course! Whether there’s a particularly good specialty store or fantastic café near you, sharing the love supports other local places and can also help you rank higher when people search for the best places locally.
Blogging is a great way to invest in yourself and build up your online presence, strengthening your brand and increasing orders in the process.
In the bustling world of restaurants, customer loyalty and repeat business are the lifelines that sustain growth. One of the most potent tools to foster this loyalty and drive repeat visits is email marketing. At Slerp, we understand that retaining a loyal customer base can be the difference between thriving and just surviving.
Email marketing isn’t just about sending promotions—it’s about building a relationship with your customers. A single visit might bring in £20, but a loyal customer who returns regularly could contribute up to £2,000 per year to your business. This underscores the importance of nurturing repeat visits and increasing customer spend with each interaction.
Email marketing offers several benefits:
Creating and growing an email list is the first crucial step in your email marketing journey. This list is your direct link to every customer who has already shown interest in your brand.
Start with your current POS system. Most systems store customer emails and contact details. Here’s how you can access and utilise this data:
Ensure every transaction—whether in-person or online—results in collecting an email address. This can be achieved by:
If your current system doesn’t support these features, consider upgrading to one that does, as collecting customer emails is fundamental to effective marketing.
Encourage new sign-ups by offering something valuable in return. Here are some effective strategies:
Always provide a compelling incentive, like a discount or a special offer, to motivate customers to share their contact information.
To take your email marketing to the next level, integrate a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. A CRM helps you manage and analyse customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the goal of improving relationships and driving sales growth.
Maintaining a regular flow of engaging emails keeps your restaurant top-of-mind for your customers. Here’s how to ensure your emails are varied and compelling:
Kick things off with a warm welcome email sequence. This is your chance to reintroduce your restaurant, highlight your new online ordering system, and offer an enticing discount, such as 25% off their first order.
Send a mix of different email types to keep things interesting and prevent unsubscribes. A typical monthly schedule might include:
This variety ensures that your emails are not only informative but also engaging and valuable.
Promotional emails are a powerful way to drive immediate action. Use these sparingly but effectively, focusing on offers that align with your business goals, such as:
Be strategic with your promotions to maintain profitability while attracting more business.
A well-designed loyalty program is a game-changer for customer retention. Here’s how to create a program that keeps customers coming back:
Encourage sign-ups with an attractive welcome offer, like a 15% off coupon. Maintain engagement by providing consistent monthly discounts and rewards. Focus on cost-effective items such as appetisers, desserts, or non-alcoholic drinks.
Regularly update customers on their loyalty points and how close they are to their next reward. Send emails after every purchase with their current point balance and next reward milestone. This keeps the program exciting and encourages frequent visits.
Design your rewards system to offer achievable and desirable incentives. Popular choices include:
Ensure the rewards are appealing enough to motivate customers to keep earning points and returning to your restaurant.
At Slerp, we make email marketing simple and effective with our CRM. Our platform automates your email campaigns, ensuring your messages are always timely, relevant, and engaging.
Ready to see how Slerp can transform your restaurant’s email marketing? Schedule a demo with us today and discover how our CRM can boost online sales
Schedule a Free Demo of Slerp’s CRM
By integrating CRM into your email marketing strategy, you’ll not only enhance customer relationships but also drive greater engagement and revenue growth. Let Slerp guide you through this transformation and elevate your restaurant’s marketing game.
We know you’re busy and have a to-do list that’s a mile long, but if you’re serious about growing your business, you need to start with the basics. Who are your customers, and where do they come from? We present to you: Google Analytics. Millions of businesses both big and small rely on this tool for web analytics. It’s a free and relatively simple tool to use.
We reckon google analytics is the perfect partner for your online ordering system. But in case you’re not familiar, we thought we’d give you a quick overview of some of the basics and how you can use them in your hospitality business.
It’s a tool that allows you to track visitors to your online shop, telling you where people have come from (through social media or email for example). You can then utilise this information to give you a better insight on how to convert these visits into sales.
You don’t need to track visits. You could just let them happen and hope for the best … just like you could continue to use marketplace apps and never own YOUR data. But as we’ve said before, if you’re looking for long term growth, you might want to reconsider. Here are a couple reasons
You want your customers to be able to find your store easily and from multiple channels. Whether they come through ads, social or just searching for your URL, you need to understand the role that each of these channels plays in your overall sales mix.
To find traffic sources for specific pages you just need to do the following:
Once you’ve grasped the basics and have learnt to navigate around your analytics, it’s time to start analysing. Looking at the data is really important and interesting but it’s what you do with it that matters.
Pay attention to what days and times are most popular with your customers and tailor your offering to what they need. Do you need to have more staff available to support your online shop on those days? Or might you need to stock up on a certain product! With analytics, you can start to anticipate customer needs.
Where are they ordering from? You might have grounds to expand your delivery radius or even think about adding ‘nationwide’ delivery to your lineup so that more people have access to your venue.
It can also give you insight into what you’re not doing well and indicate where you can improve. For example, are customers bouncing (leaving the site) before actually buying anything? Do you need to update your imagery, change product descriptions or offer a more affordable delivery rate? Analytics can help you answer all these questions and more.
Google Analytics can be intimidating at first, but it’s a really great tool when you get your head around it. Once you’ve mastered the basics and optimised your organic channels, let us help you level up. At Slerp we have an expert team of digital and performance marketers who can support you. They can increase your revenue, running ads on your social media and google search, and help you boost your search ranking through SEO, all of which attract new leads and convert them into orders.
Remember we’re always here for any questions you have or support you need, just drop us a line and we can guide you through the tools that are right for you and your hospitality business.
The hospitality industry has shown incredible resilience and adaptability in the face of the pandemic. One key trend to come from this has been the development of efficient, dependable and sophisticated systems for online ordering.
The unpredictable conditions of today’s landscape have led to many more restaurants, takeaways, and similar businesses investing in the development of online ordering and apps. So if you have recently made the excellent decision to partner with Slerp, what are the best ways to spread the word about your new digital capabilities?
If your target customers are wondering whether your hospitality business accepts online orders, one of the first things they are likely to do is visit your business’s website.
When they take that step, will they see an obvious and direct link to your online ordering system? A strong ‘call to action’ button should be placed front-and-centre on your restaurant or takeaway’s website, not hidden away in a fiddly dropdown menu.
One place you are likely to already have an engaged audience, is your brand’s social media pages. Whether your hospitality firm is active on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, there’s a lot of scope to shout about the slickness and convenience of your online ordering system with a post or tweet.
Don’t forget that social media is an amazing tool for advertising networks. So, it could be a good idea to use it to get your brand and products in front of people who are not already following your business’s social pages.
Utilise social media as an effective and affordable tool.
We all love loyalty perks, everybody loves a freebie and to feel valued. The situation is no different for your hospitality firm! You can now introduce a loyalty scheme that automatically awards customers stamps or points every time they order from you, regardless of whether it’s in person, in app or online.
It is well-known that loyalty programmes can help drive repeat orders and customer retention. At Slerp, though, we take it one step further. Partner with us and we will give you access to fully automated tools that could further help you get customers buying from you again, based on their shopping history and habits.
If you’re trying to work out who is most likely to order online with you look no further than your existing in-premise customer base. Yes they like to dine with you in person, or purchase in store, but there will be a time when they’re at home and they’re looking to order in, make sure that they think of you.
Ensure you have signage in and around your physical store, highlighting the wide-ranging online ordering capabilities you offer. Eye-catching, colourful banners featuring your website link or a QR code can go a long way – as could promotional flyers distributed to nearby homes.
Encourage your in store customers to get online.
This is another ‘old-school’ method for promoting aspects of your business, but it is a powerful one. Just imagine the awareness you could gain for your online ordering capabilities, if you simply added a QR code or printed a message about your website, ordering app and loyalty scheme on every food box you deliver.
Many of the best ways of spreading the word about your online ordering capabilities are free or relatively inexpensive – so don’t overlook great promotional opportunities right under your nose.
And don’t worry if you would rather not be too distracted from your core business right now. Partnering with Slerp can enable you to make the most of our expertise in online ordering, while freeing up your team to do what they do best.
The UK is, in many ways, a nation of takeaways. The longstanding tradition of our enjoyment is proven in the figures. Household expenditure on takeaways across the country has risen from £7.4 billion in 2009 to £11.2 billion in 2021, and is set to hit £15 billion by 2023.
But will your own takeaway business enjoy a share of that growth? To give yourself the best chance, you should be looking not just at the attractiveness of your brick-and-mortar business for ‘walk-ins’, but also at how your takeaway can better capitalise on the online space this year and beyond.
So, whether your takeaway has had some level of online presence for a while or you are only just beginning to set up a website or Google My Business listing, here are some of the steps that will really help power your takeaway business.
It doesn’t matter how big your marketing budget may be, if you lack a clear sense of what makes your takeaway distinctively attractive, you will struggle to see the success of your campaigns.
Are there unique foods or ingredients you offer? What’s your price point? Does your takeaway business specialise in ‘cheap and cheerful’ familiar favourites, or do you emphasise a particular food quality or level of experimentation with flavours, styles and shapes?
Customers are increasingly taking advantage of the variety of takeaways that give them the option to order online… and we aren’t just talking about having a standard website set up. Your platform needs to be prepared for a variety of different orders.
Some customers might want you to deliver directly to their home. Which means your system needs to be simple, intuitive and optimised for a swift delivery process, with no compromise to the quality of the food the customer receives.
Local customers might wish to take advantage of ‘click and collect’, which could be especially handy if they are on their phones and already close to your site. And speaking of phones, could now be the time for your takeaway business to have its own branded app?
Fortunately for you, these are all things that we can help you with! With Slerp by your side, your online takeaway ordering system will not only help your business to spread awareness online, but also operate more efficiently to ensure the utmost customer satisfaction and power growth.
As we’ve mentioned, it’s no longer sufficient to settle for a ‘bare bones’ online presence – unless you’re happy to miss out on a lot of potential business. This is true not only for your website and online ordering system but your whole digital marketing approach – and there will almost certainly be something more you could be doing.
Image orientated platforms like Instagram go hand in hand with food photography. Remember, you want to take advantage of your customers’ cravings, so experimenting with various angles and lighting for items from your menu will enable you to produce the most ‘instagrammable’ content to really get your customers excited.
There are so many impactful ways to promote your online takeaway. Are you using targeted ads to spread the word about your brand and products? If not, the team at Slerp can help incorporate this into your digital marketing.
The things that make a takeaway business successful these days have changed and progressed massively from the methods used 10 or 20 years ago. So it’s up to you to keep track of the latest trends and developments. Contact the experts at Slerp today, and we’ll help you get every aspect of your brand’s approach to online ordering and marketing just right.