There are just two months left in 2020 and needless to say, it’s been a challenging year. If you’re in the food and beverage space — be it a restaurant, food truck, concession stand or on-property F&B outlet — chances are you’ve been pushed to innovate and adapt to the new status quo and consumer behaviors.
On top of providing a better customer experience that meets today’s expectations of safety and convenience, it’s also important to maximize your contactless ordering platform for revenue generation. This blog will break down a few creative ways to achieve exactly that.
1. Enable Pre-Ordering For Upfront Payment
As much as possible, we encourage our partners to turn on the pre-ordering function on our platform. Be it a restaurant or a concession stand, businesses that allow for up to days ahead of fulfillment time can not only predict order volume, but also have revenue coming in ahead of time. Operationally, this reduces the amount of pressure on the staff to prepare the orders, while reducing inventory waste.
In response to COVID-19, FanFood also started a new initiative called BuildingEats, which is currently based in Chicago but is fast expanding nation-wide. BuildingEats connects local restaurants / food trucks with residential and corporate buildings, so that tenants can place pre-orders for scheduled bulk drop-off each week. Each building follows a different schedule of arriving food trucks so that every day tenants get a new food option.
Contactless ordering breaks down the limits of in-person transactions and ordering taking, which means time and location no longer matters for someone to place an order — in theory they can order anytime anywhere. As a result, encourage your customers to order ahead of time and even better, do a one-time drop-off for customers in the same area/building to reduce cost.
2. Sell Merchandise on the Platform
Menus don’t have to be limited to just food items. We encourage our partners to add anything that could be value-add to the customers beyond the core menu items. This is especially common at high school concession stands, but we’ve seen this practice across other markets including drive-ins and food trucks — and there’s no reason why any business or location can’t do the same.
For example, Spotswood High School and Woodstock High School sells team merchandise on their FanFood storefront, together with other items that fans might need when watching a game — hand warmers, ponchos etc.
Schools and local small business also can add “Donation” as a menu item. What we’ve noticed from our platform data is that people are increasingly willing to contribute to local businesses. From larger tip amount to larger average order value, FanFood users have become a community of support and giving back.
If your location has an official sponsor or advertiser, you can also display sponsorship information in the menu to help the brand get more impressions. On average a FanFood app user spends about 4 minutes in the app — that level of engagement is extremely hard to achieve for an onsite signage. To learn more about digital sponsorship at games and live events, check out how you can provide more value to your sponsors through mobile activation.
3. Be Creative with Your Menu Configuration
A great advantage of having a digital menu is that you can edit it in real time and experiment with different layout, language, images and pricing. Recently the FanFood team helped a few of our drive-in theater partners to re-design their combo menus including naming, product description, product images and pricing. Without even offering any discounts, the refreshed product names and images increased their combo sales by over 100% and increased the average order value by 10% for consecutive weeks.
Therefore, feel free to experiment with creative product item names and product descriptions. If you can, experiment with different product images! The addition of the red banner displaying “NEW” or “10% OFF” also creates a visual signal that encourages customers to place an order. The FanFood team also provides hands-on marketing and customer success support to help our partners optimize their menu designs and increase sales.
4. Use Digital Tactics To Drive Sales
What are some digital marketing channels that you’re using right now?
Social media? Website?
With a contactless ordering platform like FanFood, you’ll also have access to other means such as push notifications and promo codes that you can instantly use at your finger tips. Here’s a video showing how the use of push notifications helped Durham Bulls Athletic Park increase concession sales.
You can also set up promo codes that will automatically applied when a customer checks out. You can use that to incentivize first time orders, or offer special promotions around holidays, encourage larger order spend etc.
If you have been using social media to market to your customers, FanFood also provides a library of designs, videos and graphics that all our partners can use for free to post on their websites, social media accounts or print out as on-site signage.