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Due to recent events, delivery and pick-up orders are increasing rapidly. In challenging time such as this, how can you make sure your restaurant is top of mind for customers? Here are some ways you can stand out amongst your competition and encourage customers to continue to order from your restaurant.

Old Fashioned Drive-In Restaurants

Who can forget the experience of an old fashioned drive-in restaurant? When customers would drive up to a restaurant and eat in their cars. Since customers visiting your restaurant can not come in and sit, why not deliver food to them instead? However, make sure your servers are taking proper precautions to wash their hands, sanitize after each meal delivery and keep social-distancing.

Create A Loyalty Program

Everyone loves to earn points and win free stuff! Most of us have changed our shopping, eating, and travelling patterns to earn points for our purchases. Therefore, having a loyalty program is a no brainer! The eventual winning of a prize has a lot of influence on people's spending and drives repeat sales! We recommend a digital loyalty program, especially these days, since customers won't be able to present a card physically.

Get Personal With Personalized Messages

Something playful that restaurants can add to take-out orders is the option to include a personalized message; offer this option during the time of ordering. The customer can decide what message they wish to send out if they are ordering for family or friends, or they can request funny jokes or pictures. It is an easy and low-cost way of adding some fun into food delivery. Also, you can encourage customers to share their personalized messages on social media with a specific hashtag. This is a great way to promote the restaurant as well as showcase food orders.

Take Advantage of Social Media 

Social media is an excellent tool to build your business profile and attract new customers. With social media, you can create videos, promote new specials, highlight limited time offers, feature your employees, offer cooking lessons, interviews with the chef, and give a "behind the scenes" look to your customers. People are craving social interaction more than ever before and making your restaurant approachable is the golden ticket. 

Bring The Restaurant To Their Home.

Is your restaurant known for a particular theme or ambiance? Unfortunately, because restaurants patrons can not sit down inside, why not bring the restaurant to them? For example, why not try including a wine list pairing with the food they ordered, a tea light candle, labelled napkins or with each order include paper placemats and crayons for children. If your business includes toys for children at the end of the meal add the toys in as well or the breath mints they could have picked up upon exiting the facility. It is simple things like this that provide an extraordinary experience beyond just receiving a take out meal. Also, don’t forget to add in promotional materials to spark their interest in ordering again. Furthermore, you can create a contest and encourage customers to share their experience on social media and offer a reward such as a discount on their next order.

Special Limited Time Offers.

Offering a special limited-time offer is a great way to not only attract new customers but to retain them. This is a wonderful way to tempt people to try out your restaurant. Some examples of limited-time offers can be free meals for kids, 50% off desserts and special fixe prix menus on certain days. Also, you can leverage certain social media days such as, "National Peanut Butter And Jelly Day," this will create traffic to your social media. Here is a complete list of Annual Food Holidays for Restaurants.

Ordering take-out is one of the simple pleasures that is still available. Make your restaurant stand out amongst the competition by offering a loyalty program, personalized messages, unique experience, and limited-time offers. Become present on social media and increase traffic to your restaurant during this challenging time. Customers will remember you for it.