Picture 300 orders a week: three hundred people who enjoyed your food and went home happy. Now a simple question: how many of them can you contact directly?
For orders that arrive through a marketplace the answer is usually none, and that is how the model works: the marketplace brings the customer, handles visibility, payment and delivery, and keeps the relationship. That has real value. But it leaves a question open: what about the customers who are truly yours?
Your customers don't all come from the same place
Think of the people who reach you by other routes:
- people who find you on Google or Instagram;
- regulars;
- people who walk past and see the window, or come to the counter;
- people who scan the QR code on a table, the counter or the window.
They don't need a marketplace to find you. They need an easy way to order. And if they order on a channel of your own, you get to know who they are. Knowing your neighbourhood is good for both sides: customers are recognised and rewarded for coming back, and the restaurant remembers them.
What you gain by knowing your customers
Without data you are left with "hope marketing": hoping customers remember you, come back and tell a friend. With data you can:
- See who your best customers are.
- Win back people who stopped ordering. Someone who ordered every week and has gone quiet for a month deserves a message.
- Reward loyalty. There is no loyalty programme without knowing who is loyal.
- Sell more to people who already trust you. Bringing a customer back is usually cheaper than winning a new one.
Marketplaces and own channel, each with a role
You don't have to choose. Marketplaces are a good source of new customers and visibility, and the commission pays for that service. Stay there.
Your own channel does something else: it is where your customers order directly and where you keep the name, contact, history and preferences of the people who buy. Customers who arrive through a marketplace are that marketplace's customers, and each platform's rules should be respected.
The steps
- Set up an ordering channel of your own, mobile-first.
- Present it to people who are already yours: QR codes, a link on Instagram and your Google profile, a card in the dining room.
- Keep the contact with each order, with consent.
- Talk to them directly: a new dish, a promotion, a nudge to people who stopped coming.
The data is yours, and leaves with you
With GetFoodies the customer data from your channel belongs to the restaurant and you can download it whenever you like. There is no lock-in: if you ever leave, you take your customer base with you.
How GetFoodies helps
An ordering website and app with your brand, no GetFoodies commission per order, and a dashboard with the history of each customer on your channel. We are also working on showing marketplace orders in the same dashboard; that is not available yet.
Start with one question
Look at the last 100 orders that came through your own channels (phone, counter, site, social) and try to say who those people were. If you can't, you know where to start.