Successful Restaurant Websites

As we’ve discussed before, when customers order food on the Internet, they visit more often and spend more money. This has incentivized businesses such as Subway to introduce an online and mobile ordering system where customers can order sandwiches for pickup in their local store. They have accompanied this new service with a sizable online marketing effort and offering special offers to mobile customers.  While most of our readers don’t maintain the type of infrastructure for this scale of service, you’ll find principles that apply to smaller, independent restaurants.

“In an attempt to break into the world of online and text message ordering, Subway has partnered with Go Mobo to implement its Subway Now pilot, which began earlier this month in Manhattan. According to GoMobo’s Web site, Internet orders are on average of 15–20 percent larger than phone orders.”

Currently, this service is only available in New York City at www.subwaynow.com, but given its early success, it will likely expand to other areas.

Subway tests online, mobile-ordering program

Blogger That Pam Chick perfectly describes a situation restaurant visitors experience all too often.  A customer checks out a restaurant’s website before visiting.  She reviews the menu options, selects items she may want to order, emails your link to her dining partners, etc.  When she arrives at the restaurant, there is a significant discrepancy between the menu on a restaurant’s website and what is actually available in the restaurant.

With the number of customers who research restaurants online before visiting, it is more critical than ever for restaurants to keep their websites up to date.  When customers see inconsistencies between your website and your store, it’s a big turnoff.  If you have a menu that changes daily, or very frequently, we understand this might not be feasible.  However, you can still provide customers with an accurate overview of your current offerings without updating the site on a daily basis.  However, you must clearly communicate to customers that this menu that may not reflect all of today’s options.    You may also provide an option to call or email you for the latest menu.  However, in the time it takes for you to respond to their inquiry, you could have just updated your website!  The moral of the story is:  Diners look at your websites closely, oftentimes making menu selections before they visit.  If you don’t want to disappoint them, keep your online menu up to date.

“The waitress had no idea what was even on the website and I bet if I asked her what the domain was she would have to ask someone else. It is astonishing that companies still feel like once they put up a website they are done. Your website needs to be fully integrated into your everyday business and updated regularly. Especially if you have client-facing employees, they need to be well versed in what is on your website. You and your employees will look like idiots if a customer asks a question about something they saw on your website and the employee has no answer.”

The author goes on to mention that she will not be going back to this restaurant.

A side note, restaurants should keep menu prices up to date on their websites.  With customers more budget-conscious than ever, it’s disappointing and misleading when prices on a restaurant’s website don’t match those in the store.

Currant Restaurant.  What?  We Have a Website?

The National Restaurant Association brought this Dallas News article to our attention.  It discusses the power and popularity of coupons in generating restaurant business during these difficult economic times.  Many restaurants are finding that a larger percentage of their customers are using coupons than ever before, suggesting that many are looking beyond a stigma associated with discount dining.  At the same time, restaurants who were once hesitant to offer coupons are now seeing it as a necessary way of getting customers in the door. While print coupons, such as in newspapers and mailings are still popular with diners, online and mobile coupons are gaining more presence.

“We’re getting people that laid low on couponing for one or two years coming back.

Money Mailer is now moving into “mobile couponing,” in which consumers agree to receive coupons via cellphone text messages.

In a recent promotion for a fast-food chain, 13 percent of the text message coupons were redeemed, said Steven Gray, chief operating officer of Money Mailer, who said that “5 percent is a good return.”

Dallas-based On the Border Mexican Grill & Cantina offers a text promotion during many Dallas Stars and Mavericks games – each respondent gets a coupon for $5 off a $25 purchase.”

What are your options for online and mobile couponing?  Traditional print coupon companies such as Valpak have expanded to the online space.  Here the customer visits the Valpak website, enters their zip code and sees coupons and discounts available in that area.  Restaurants can also make coupons available for download on their own website.  This is simple to implement and promote to customers while simultaneously driving traffic to the website.  Also check out companies such as Cellfire and Merchant Circle who offer coupons to mobile and online customers based on their interests and location.

Restaurants cozying up to coupon-clippers

We usually reserve our Nice Sites posts for individual restaurants, however we thought this restaurant group had a simple, attractive site providing basic information and professional photography for each of their properties.

Hillstone

Even if you don’t serve pizza, Pizza Marketplace has some useful tips that will get you thinking about your restaurant’s mobile website.

Make it simple

“Avoid inundating your mobile customers with text and slow-loading pictures. Mobile shoppers are looking for simple solutions that they can act on quickly, so keep your messages short. Even in these days of “all you can eat” data plans, many users are still paying for every byte they download…”

Market by text

“Your customers are your community. SMS marketing is designed to generate an immediate response from them. People carry their mobile phones all the time, so keep in touch with them by offering an opt-in text messaging system to let them know about special deals and menu items…”

Bringing it all together

“Mobile marketing is not an island; today it’s all about the multi-channel approach. To most effectively communicate with your current and prospective customer base, integrate your mobile marketing strategy with traditional printed posters, menus, ads and other aspects of online and email marketing…”

Selling Pizza by cell

No one despises business acronyms more than I do, but I wanted to share with you a few that are creeping up enough that you should be familiar with them.    The first is ORM and it means Online Reputation Management.    It refers to the monitoring of online content related to a business’ reputation. (duh).  It’s also something that restaurants need to be aware of more and more as they navigate virtually unlimited professional and amateur online commentary and customer reviews.  (Speaking of customers, don’t confuse ORM with CRM.  The latter stands for Customer Relationship Management and refers to how you manage and market to your customer base).  Not surprisingly, ORM has become a niche consulting specialty where you can pay a firm to monitor your reputation for you, not just in professional publications, but also blogs, ratings and other forms of reviews.   Presumably they also offer damage control in the event of harmful or inaccurate information.

The reason restaurants need to concern themselves with their ORM is largely because of CGM.  If you can’t guess, CGM means consumer generated media.  CGM is generally related to the comments and ratings around products and services and can take the form of online posts, emails, videos, images, bookmarking or any other medium.  Consumers take CGM very seriously when they are considering a purchase.  For example, you may read the comments and reviews of a book on Amazon before deciding to buy it.   Or, a potential customer may read the comments about your restaurant on Yelp before deciding to visit.  In sum, CGM is one factor to consider in your ORM strategy.

Finally, I can’t fail to mention UGC and UCC.   UGC stands for User Generated Content and UCC stands for User Created Content.   They are used interchangeably and both are synonymous with CGM.   However, CGM is considered more all-encompassing of different media types and may ultimately be considered the default term.

Following up on our last post about enabling mobile users to view your restaurant’s website, we wanted to share some trends for 2009 in mobile entertainment.  This list is compiled by the Mobile Entertainment Forum (I’d never heard of them either) who predicts this to be an important and interesting year for reaching mobile customers.

1. The ‘iPhone effect’ –Mobile applications have emerged as a new content category and the mobile internet will finally come of age

2. Greater value and transparency for consumers will help sustain demand in 2009

3. Some delay in the proliferation of mobile advertising

4. Telcos begin to acts as enablers for the Entertainment industry with services such as billing, authentication and zero tariff data driving take-up

5. The emerging dominance of services that operate at a multi-platform level

6. The rise of ring back tones

7. Social networking becomes an important driver of mobile entertainment consumption

8. 2009 will be the year that mobile video really takes off

9. Emerging Economies will become an increasingly important driver for mobile entertainment worldwide

10. A proliferation of touch screen devices continues to drives discoverability and content usage

The new year is a great time to take a step back and have a look at your website strategy and your opportunities to reach more customers.  The exciting (and sometimes frustrating) part about the online space and using technology to connect with customers is that it’s always changing.  One thing we encourage restaurants to look at more seriously this year are the opportunities to market through mobile devices. Features such as SMS text messages, mobile coupons and more sophisticated targeting of customers in your local area are inexpensive ways to help generate business.

At a minimum, restaurants need to optimize their homepages and other key landing pages in their website for mobile use.  Often a mobile user will conduct a search, find your restaurant in search results, and click on the link to view more information such as your address, location, hours or menu.  Or, they may be searching through a site such as Yelp and want to link to your website for more information.  If your site is not providing this potential customer with the information they need quickly and easily, you may have just missed out on their business.  Take a look at your website on a web-enabled phone. Have friends or colleagues do the same as different phones display websites differently and you want to reach potential customers regardless of the type of phone they carry. If your website has the most important information at the top of the page, you can view and access the site navigation and things generally look good, then you’re off to a good start.

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On the NY Times booze blog, The Pour, Eric Asimov discusses the disappearance of wine lists on restaurant websites.  Some restaurants have found that competitors were checking their sites to review their wine list and adjusting their own prices accordingly.  We love browsing restaurant wine lists online as we never have enough time to do so at a restaurant.  And as a general rule, we believe that a restaurant should be as transparent as possible on their website and provide customers with the information they want.  But restaurants who see their wine list as key a differentiator from their competitors may be less inclined to share.

“…Some restaurants have consciously removed their wine lists from public domain. I used to fantasize occasionally by scanning the list at Veritas on East 20th Street, one of the country’s top wine-oriented restaurants. But when I sought it out recently, I couldn’t find it.

“We did pull it down,’’ Tim Kopec, the wine director, told me. “We felt that a lot of our competition was stealing information. If another restaurant is going to sell all the first-growth Bordeaux of 1982, it’s easy for them to check out our pricing and sell it for $25 less. It makes us look bad. We want to protect what we’re doing.’’

Wine Lists As Armchair Reading (The Pour, NY Times)