“Mobile First.” – This statement puts the spotlight on the importance of prioritizing the mobile user experience for a brand working towards digital success. Around the globe, about 73% of transactions happening online take place on a mobile device.
In recognition of this trend, we have seen more and more restaurant brands launch their own branded mobile app in recent years. Better yet, restaurants have seen how successful mobile apps can be when it comes to driving engagement and revenue.
In this post we will talk about four ways that mobile apps can help you grow your restaurant and make a case as to why you should get on board now if you don’t have one already.
Elevated Online Ordering Experience
A mobile ordering app for your restaurant helps elevate the user experience, giving your customers the power to engage with your brand in a convenient and compelling way. This can be proven with the fact that, conversion rates on mobile apps is 157% higher than the web platform. Compared to a web ordering interface, mobile apps have a clear edge in design and user experience as they’re built natively for the mobile platform (iOS or Android).
This allows for captivating and dynamic home screens, the most efficient ordering processes, and the ability to serve your customers on the go, where and when they want to order.
Read: Increase your Average Basket Size
More Accurate and Precise Customer Data
With your own ordering mobile app, you are able to get a more complete picture of your customer’s behavior by capturing more accurate data.
Everything from what your customers are buying, and how they’re interacting and spending the most of their time on, to when to what product sells more at different locations or in different regions.
This information can be a powerful tool in helping you align your strategy with market needs, customizing promotions to the habits of customers, and structuring your discounts and upsells to help increase basket size, purchase frequency and promote loyalty. Complete data is a major key in unlocking your restaurant brand’s digital success.
Also Read: 3 Reasons Restaurants should Own their Customer Data
Ability to Leverage Push Notifications
We’ve discussed how apps can help capture and utilize customer data to its full potential. While that can be done using web platform to a certain extent, apps bring a unique advantage in reaching out to your customers; push notifications.
With custom tailored push notifications, you can reach a segment of your audience with an offer that data tells you they want to see, increasing relevance and effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and discount offers.
Using this very simple technique, Topper’s Pizza (a multi-outlet pizza chain) was able to achieve tremendous results, generating more than $50k in sales, and 5X their daily sale rate. All this was possible due to push notifications and by understanding and utilizing their customer data.
Also Read: How Topper’s Pizza increased their in-app revenue by 400% with a single push notification
Personally Tailored Loyalty Programs
While loyalty programs are not a new concept, programs delivered through mobile apps can be far more dynamic and tailored to the customer than traditional offline loyalty programs.
Whether the program is a points based, tier based, or cash back structure, a good mobile app program will provide the ability to effectively control and segment rewards and incentives that will resonate best with your customers.
This will help drive customer engagement and improve the effectiveness of your loyalty program. With mobile apps, customers can also have the ability to earn and redeem points in-store with scan-for-loyalty functionality, making for a complete omni-channel experience.
Want to learn more about how loyalty programs can be key to restaurant growth strategy and creating promoters; Check out the blog post linked below.
Read: 5 Tips on Building Restaurant Loyalty Programs that Work
Conclusion
These have been some ways mobile apps can help you grow your restaurant brand online. We here at Smooth believe “engagement drives commerce” and that mobile apps are a critical tool to becoming more accessible as a brand, creating the best customer experiences, and driving business growth.
About Smooth Commerce
Smooth Commerce is an all-in-one digital commerce and customer marketing platform for restaurants that combines online and mobile ordering, delivery, loyalty, and powerful marketing tools to help you grow your business, while giving you access to your customer data to help grow your restaurant.
If you would like to learn more or talk to a representative from Smooth Commerce about how our platform can help you meet your loyalty goals, contact us at learnmore@smooth.tech.
