Marketing
Why Food Aggregators Want Your Restaurant's Customer Data
March 23, 2022
4 min
Your restaurant customer data might be the most valuable digital asset you have. With it, you're able to independently create and sustain direct relationships with your customer base, control your order volume and flow, increase customer retention, collect valuable feedback, improve your operations, and more.
Now, you might find yourself asking:
Where do I find this invaluable data?
We've all become used to entering some basic information when signing up to a new online service, and food delivery solutions are no different.
Beyond that information, automatic tracking via the Facebook Pixel and Google cookies empowers restaurants with the ability to create sophisticated audiences necessary for successful social marketing campaigns.
With a food portal or aggregator, you miss out on incredibly insightful information — but not with your own direct ordering system, like ChatFood.
What you can do with this data:
Let's think up a scenario: say you're an Acai concept, and much like The Acai Spot, you're savvy with your marketing. Your existing Facebook Pixel and Google cookie audiences have identified the type of consumer that frequents your restaurant, without strenuous research effort from your team.
Using this data, only accessible via a direct ordering platform that can integrate these tools into your menu, your social media advertising has identified a customer that is most likely to order your food, as the algorithm matches them to data that you've automatically collected. This customer places an order, and before they know it, they've become a loyal customer.
When they order again, the ability to see that this customer has ordered many times before affords restaurants the opportunity to solidify this customer’s loyalty — rewarding customers with something extra, or opening a line of communication via a thank you note.
The following week, this same customer hears their phone ping and notices a text message from the restaurant that they love. There's a special this weekend on their favorite dish, and they click the link to order. SMS marketing is incredibly powerful, and access to customer phone numbers enables restaurants to dramatically decrease their acquisition cost by up to 4.8 times!
After a while, this customer unfortunately stops ordering from you. Since you have the customer's email, your ChatFood system can automatically reactivate this dormant customer with an email, reminding them of the great experience they had, and enticing them to reorder from your restaurant — another incredibly effective marketing tool.
This was just the journey of one customer — let us not forget the compounding effect of open channels of communication between your brand and your customers, deepening loyalty and increasing your order volume.
When your customers order through a third-party app, this information is withheld from you, and instead used to sell the apps marketing services to other restaurants on the platform.
That's right, your customers' data is being sold to your competitors!
Beyond this, aggregators glean useful insights into food and location trends, and use this to beat smaller businesses to market with fresh ideas and concepts — often recruiting restaurants as ghost kitchens or dark kitchens to test hundreds of concepts at the same time. And in the long run, we all lose from this separation of businesses and their customers data.
It's simple. Your customer data is incredibly valuable, and you should collect as much as you can. Not only will this improve your customers‚ experience by having a direct line of communication, but it will allow you to take crucial marketing and operations steps with confidence.
When you sign up with ChatFood, you get access to all of this data and more, allowing you to reclaim ownership of your customers’ loyalty.
What are you waiting for?
