4 ways pre-ordering can help your business

Ultimately, in order to be more than a gimmick, businesses need to understand the strategic reasons behind the mobile app they use and the functionality they offer to customers. To help you, here we lay out the four business-critical reasons behind having an online and mobile ordering service, so that the development of the mobile offering can have a strategic purpose.

Help improve the customer experience

At popular times, businesses can struggle with lines and congestion, at tills, at the bar, or wherever the customer places their order and pays. The time it takes for customers to choose what they want, make the order and find the appropriate payment method is time that they can spend doing other things. Moreover, it eliminates the time that customers spend waiting for other people to complete their order. Mobile and online pre-ordering helps cut this by allowing customers to make their order at their leisure and pay for it. By removing the friction of the in-store ordering process, you will be improving your customers’ experience, and a happy customer, is a loyal customer.

Help customer acquisition

In addition to being a way to improve your relationship with an existing customer base, digital ordering opens businesses to new streams of customers and therefore, revenue potential.

There has been much commentary on how millennials and younger generations are pushing brands to be more mobile-savvy, but as the gap in smartphone penetration and app usage between younger and older generations is closing, having online and mobile services is something that all appeals to all. Offering a mobile and online service and delivery means that you can appeal to consumers without relying on foot traffic for them to discover and interact with you.

Help smooth operations

The data provided by digital pre-ordering platforms can help you improve your operations. Are in-store service speeds improving now staff time isn’t taken up with telephone orders? What are the stock levels? Having customers pre-order means you can reduce waste and better control your stock – improving profit.

Help grow your business through data and marketing

Through the data provided by a pre-ordering service, you can learn more about both your business and your customer base. You can find things out like – what is the customer’s average basket size and how does this compare to the orders you’re getting in-store? Is there an upward trend in spend? How are order volumes comparing to order value? Should you be looking more at increasing the volume of small orders, or do you want to up-sell? It also allows businesses to improve their marketing to customer segments and individual customers. For instance, you can tell when a particular customer first placed an order with you, how large their average orders are and how many times they have placed an order in a set period of time, or whether they haven’t.

If they stop ordering for a while, that gives you the opportunity to reach out to them individually and maybe give them a personalised offer via email or text. Without that kind of data, you won’t know that the customer isn’t ordering and you wouldn’t have a chance to win them back.

Data gives you a measure of how your customers are behaving. If you want to know how well they have taken to a new dish you should check the data to see the uptake and make a decision around whether it needs to be taken off the menu or extra marketing. Data tells you about your business and helps you grow.

Ultimately investing in new technology requires a business case and this will be different for individual companies. However, all organisations want to grow and mobile and online ordering can help make this happen.

To find out more about how mobile and online ordering can help your business, get in contact for a chat and free demo.