How to Drive More Revenue with Your Customers’ Ordering Data

Customer Data is a Goldmine

Restaurant owners nationwide are brainstorming strategies on how to not only survive the pandemic, but create real, long-term relationships and income by increasing focus on customer data. Customer ordering data, specifically, is playing a critical role in how restaurant owners determine what strategies to implement and drive additional revenue. 

Data is incredibly valuable. It tells you exactly who your customers are, what they love, and what drives their behaviors. Using this data allows restaurant owners to maximize their offerings and drive repeat business. In the competitive restaurant industry, customers are becoming increasingly selective with their spending, and with their limited disposable income. Understanding and leveraging customer data should not be overlooked. 

Here’s where to start: 

Make More Sales by Adjusting Your Menu to Focus on What’s Hot Versus What’s Not

Remove Menu Items that Aren’t Popular

Customer order data allows you to gauge your menu items based on popularity, so you can see customer favorites as well as the ones that might be worth nixing. Use your sales data to trim down your menu to remove the meal options that customers aren’t choosing often, or ones with hard to source ingredients that don’t always get used up before they spoil. By focusing on what your customers really love to eat at your establishment, you can keep inventory costs low and profitability high. 

Maximize Items that are Most Popular

Wondering what’s hot at your restaurant? Dive into your data to find out. By finding out what your customers order the most, you can tailor your promotions to maximize sales. If your Taco Tuesday is bringing in crowds, consider adding a Tex-Mex Thursday to entice customers while using up leftover inventory. 

Or, if your homemade marinara sauce is a community favorite, bottle it up and offer it to-go for families who want to recreate their favorite meals, from your restaurant, at home. Adjust your menu by days of the week to optimize inventory and capitalize on what your customers are already craving. 

Increase Customer Spending by Determining When and How to Run Promotions 

When are Your Slow Times? 

While you may already have a feel for which days of the week and what times are slowest for your restaurant, it’s better to have the data to back it up. With this data, you can launch new promotions for those days and times, giving you new opportunities to increase sales. You can also use this information to adjust staffing levels as needed to decrease labor costs. 

Combined with menu data, this information can help you truly maximize your sales. So if, for instance, you see that Monday evenings are slower than the rest of the week, but your boneless wings appetizers are particularly popular with customers, you can offer a discount on wings with any meal purchase every Monday evening. This brings in revenue on days where you may have previously experienced slow business.  

What Drives Customer Response?

Have you been putting all your marketing eggs in one basket? Maybe you’ve been sending out mailer coupons or including coupons in customer orders. How many of those customers actually bring them in to redeem? 

On the surface, customer data can seem difficult to decipher, but when you take a closer look, it can be a virtual window into past efforts and how they’ve worked out, so you can better predict what you need to do in the future. 

By looking into your customer data, you can see which promotions you’ve run in the past, identify how many sales resulted from it, and use your findings to determine which promotions would be the most profitable. That way, you can eliminate outdated promotions that don’t offer up a significant ROI (like mailed coupons) and focus more on the ones that do (like mobile app promotions, for instance). This allows you to stretch your marketing budget further and see a greater return over time. 

Increase Ticket Size by Personalizing the Customer Experience 

Everyone’s familiar with standard loyalty promotional perks, like birthday coupons. Those are great and still valuable. But, you can take your customer experience so much further than just a special day once a year. All it takes is the right restaurant technology tools and customer data. 

If a customer regularly orders family meals and dinner kits, you’ll be much more likely to see them come back if you send them personalized promotions for a dine-in family special or a kids meal coupon than you would if you offered half-priced drinks for two. 

Likewise, you’d drive way more loyalty and profits by offering deals on at-home cocktail kits with online orders for customers that usually take you up on your dine-in cocktail specials. Data gives you the power to harness your customer’s order history and preferences so you can send customized promotions for things they actually like.  

Don’t Let Third-Party Services Own Your Customer Data

Many restaurants partner with third-party online ordering and delivery platforms to increase their operative capacity and expand their reach. While these services are great if you don’t have the in-house resources to offer them on your own, they often come with a caveat: they are in control over the customer data. 

By integrating all of your ordering channels into a restaurant management system (RMS), including third-party services, you can ensure that all of the customer data remains your own. This also gives you the benefit of consolidating it all into one place. 

HungerRush has a robust RMS that includes a digital ordering platform, a strong loyalty program coupled with group ordering, third party integrations, and driver logistics, not to mention a killer coupon and reward management system that delivers results. With it, returning customers can easily place orders and have the option to save their addresses, payments, and even vehicle type for a more streamlined experience. They also get instant and exclusive access to loyalty rewards and discounts. 

HungerRush automates the process of collecting data on all of your ordering platforms, both on- and off-premises, and makes all of this data easier to manage and understand so that you can gain critical insight without spending hours poring over spreadsheets. This gives you a 360-degree view of your customer data, allowing you to make more informed business decisions that drive additional revenue. 

For more information on the HungerRush Restaurant Management System, request a demo with us today!