How To Increase Food Delivery Sales

Food delivery is an important — and profitable — revenue channel for restaurants, with delivery sales skyrocketing during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Deciding to take the leap into food delivery, and then figuring out how to increase food delivery sales, can be a little daunting. But we’re here to give you the best food delivery marketing strategies, as well as tips for food delivery businesses. 

How to Increase Food Delivery Sales

First off, ensure that your menu and photos are mobile-responsive and easy to navigate. Online ordering platforms made for restaurants are a great way to ensure that you can provide a great user experience for your customers. 

Read below on how to increase food delivery sales, what makes a good food delivery experience, and how to market your food delivery successfully!

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Start Doing Email Marketing

Email marketing is a wildly effective tactic that more and more restaurants are tapping into. By capturing your customers’ emails through your online ordering and delivery system, you can then reach out to them with targeted email marketing campaigns about your delivery offerings to get them to order again. 

Retaining customers is an incredibly lucrative business strategy — sometimes, it’s even more important than finding new ones. 

For more, check out our 101 guide to email marketing for restaurants.

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Do a Menu Engineering Analysis

Increasing sales isn’t just about getting more people to order — it’s also about increasing overall check sizes.

Menu engineering is a framework used to do a menu analysis that helps you identify which items are you most profitable and which are the most popular. Once you have this information, you can decide how to organize your delivery menu so that these star items are featured, which can help you drive up total check size.

You can also consider an add-ons or snacks section of your online menu to tempt guests into adding those extra side dishes that also drive up check size.

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Use Photos and the Golden Triangle

Once you’ve done your menu engineering and determined which items need to be your menu’s shining stars, you can use the design principles of menu psychology to optimize and create a high-performing delivery menu.

Here are a few menu design principles you can apply to your online menu if you want to increase food delivery sales:

• Photos! Ensure that your menu has high-quality, accurate images that display your menu in the best light. Having an image next to every food item is best practice here.

• Eye movements: people tend to look at the middle of a page, next to the top right corner, and then to the top left corner, which is known as the “Golden Triangle”. Place your most profitable items there. When working with an online delivery menu, make sure you can spotlight your most profitable items right at the top of the page.

• Descriptive language: rather than using hyperbole — like “the best burger in town” —  and use enticing descriptions to tell your diners about each menu item. Instead, say something like “Cheeseburger made with grass-fed beef and american cheese, plus any of our fresh toppings and housemade sauces.”

For more tips on menu design, check out this post.

Offer Special Promotions

Wondering how to market your food delivery business? Consider running special promotions exclusively for delivery customers if you’re looking for how to increase restaurant delivery sales. 

Here are a few examples of promotional offers if you’re looking to increase delivery sales: 

• Percentage discount: e.g. 10% off for an order of $25 or more 

• Free delivery: e.g. $0 delivery fee on orders of $30 or more (make sure the order minimum is high enough to justify the free delivery)

• Free/discounted item: e.g. Order two burger combos and receive a 24oz soda of your choice free!

Remember: you want to test out different promotions so that you can see what works and what doesn’t for your business. Make that promotion enticing enough for your customers, but not so expensive for your business that you lose out on revenue.

Highlight Promotions on Social Media

You’ve heard it before, but here’s us telling you again: social media is a powerful way to connect with your audience and get them to order from your business.

You can use delivery-only promotions as a way to grow your social media following, and as a way to get your existing following to choose your restaurant for dinner tonight. 

To learn more about leveraging your social media channels, check out our guide to social media for restaurants.

Listen to Customer Feedback

Don’t discount customer feedback in improving your food delivery services! They’re a great source to discover what makes a great food delivery experience. Solicit feedback with surveys in receipts, and if you’re using an in-house delivery or the Toast Delivery Services, you have access to customer’s email addresses, enabling you to tap into how to market your food delivery efficiently. Implement feedback if you notice trends — customers often have great suggestions!

Partner With a Great Food Delivery Service

The logistics of restaurant pickup and delivery services have been the subject of much discussion over the past year and a half. There are a few ways you can start offering delivery for your restaurant: via third-party apps (like Uber Eats and DoorDash) or in-house delivery systems.

Using a third-party delivery service is great for restaurants just starting out, or restaurants that can’t shoulder the cost of starting their own delivery service. These apps also serve as a great marketing tool, because they expand your reach to customers you might never have reached otherwise, helping you drive sales.

And if you want to expand to a younger demographic, third-party apps may be key. 63% of young adults use third-party delivery apps, according to a study conducted by Zion & Zion.

But if you choose to work with a third-party delivery vendor, it’s standard for them to take a percentage of every order they send your way. Uber Eats, for example, charges a fee of approximately 30% of every check that comes to the restaurant via Uber Eats. That can really add up.

You’ll also have less control over the delivery process. Creating and operating your own delivery system gives you greater control over the guest experience, ensuring that at-home diners can enjoy the same consistency and quality. And with third-party delivery, guest data belongs to the third-party vendor, and you won’t be able to reap the benefits of getting to know your customer base and identifying ordering trends.

If you’re looking for a trustworthy food delivery system that allows you to own your online delivery channels without high commission fees, consider Toast Delivery Services.

With Toast Delivery Services, you own your guest data and can use the insights for targeted marketing and loyalty campaigns. Our flat delivery fees allow you to have complete control over your margins; and this cost can be passed to customers, too. Plus, you don’t have to worry about maintaining a fleet of drivers — you have access to Doordash’s network of drivers. 

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Get Your Food to Your Guests — Wherever they Are

It’s no mistake that food delivery is here to stay—the convenience for customers is unmatched, especially if you’re able to execute and replicate the same quality as an in-house dining experience. With preparation, the right partner, and implementing important customer feedback, you can have an exceptional restaurant pickup and delivery service. 

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