Restaurant Data Analytics Boosting Revenue During Covid-19 Pandemic

Restaurant data analytics is an important part of running a successful restaurant. 

By understanding your customers, you can better cater to their needs and ensure that your business continues to thrive.

Data Analytics For Restaurants To Grow Revenues

Restaurants are using data analytics to increase revenues in a variety of ways.
Below are a few ways you can utilise data analytics for restaurants:

• Use data to improve their customer service
• Use it to optimize menu items or pricing. 
• Use data for marketing purposes, such as tailoring content or advertising specifically towards certain demographics.

By taking advantage of restaurant data analytics, you can ensure that you remain competitive against ever-growing restaurant chains and keep more customers happy.

Blink’s Role In Helping Restaurants to Scale:

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many food businesses to transition in quite a haphazard manner. Before the pandemic, hospitality businesses mainly focused on keeping the pantry full, running social media campaigns via paid vs. non-paid channels, and serving good quality food at competitive rates.

Anything out of the ordinary, especially, before the pandemic was usually treated as a “distraction” for customers. Soon after COVID-19 hit the industry, the digitization trend began to operate in full swing.

Data-driven results, decisions based on metrics, personalized marketing campaigns, loyalty programs, and such other strategic variants are just the tip of the iceberg for food businesses right now.

Blink, in this regard, made the jump to welcome new and upcoming food startup businesses in a variety of manners. Let’s take a look at some of the key highlights:

Flexible Business Model:

As a food services aggregator, Blink introduced a very flexible low percentage business model to restaurants and food businesses of all sizes and shapes. Depending on the operator’s business scale and overall requirements, the percentage is somewhere around 2% – 2.5%, which is phenomenally low as compared to other service providers in the industry. 

For instance UberEats, FoodPanda, DoorDash, charge up to 41% as per order commission percentage. Blink’s fee is nominal because it not only helps startups to maintain their focus on scaling but also gives them ample room to meet the breakeven point requirements.

Logistics & Fleet Management through Data-Driven Analytics:

Fleet management at Blink takes a completely different turn. Since businesses transitioned to online food order delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic, it called for swift solutions to deliver food wherever customers go.

In that order, Blink has a sophisticated fleet management portal that highlights average delivery time, rider performance, the maximum number of orders delivered with data-wise drill down, and vice versa. You can see the best-performing areas and critical pain points that require the deployment of additional delivery agents.

Above all, you can have a detailed drill-down on many other aspects of food delivery operations through ‘Blink Rider Portal’. The sophisticated menu redirects users to a dedicated dashboard that details multiple touchpoints related to food delivery reports, rider information, branch-wise reporting, etc. 

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Blink enables Businesses with Multiple Payment Modes:

Blink’s online ordering platform for restaurants is a combination of different features that assist restaurants, and food businesses, in general with business transactions.

Blink Co. does not have its own POS tool, but it does offer plenty of other perks to unify the ordering process. As a food business operator, by signing up with Blink for a merchant account, you get your own:

• Android / iOS Food Ordering App
• White-Labeled Desktop Food Ordering Website
• Food Ordering Facility for Customers through Facebook, Instagram, and Direct Phone No.

On top of it, the dynamic dashboard at Blink’s back end is lined up with a robust Microsoft Power Bi reporting system to give you complete control over your restaurant business workflow.

SMS Campaign Options:

During the lockdown period, businesses shifted the majority of their focus to remote marketing strategies. Blink Co. was already ahead of the curve because the had been offering integrated SMS marketing options to vendors from the comfort of the user dashboard panel.

Operators can select from a variety of low-cost marketing packages to throttling their SMS campaigns.

As compared to Email Marketing and other restaurant marketing strategies, SMS messages are direct in nature; they have the highest engagement rate and grab user attention without wasting much time.

During the extended COVID-19 lockdown phase, a lot of operators working with Blink used the SMS campaign plans to maximize the restaurant services outreach spectrum.

The good news is that SMS marketing can be further enhanced by using reports from the ‘Customer Data Management’ section. In a way, the feature is centric on customer buying patterns, and it elicits few filter options through a dedicated drop-down menu. As a food business operator in agreement with Blink Co., you can use the full potential of SMS marketing campaigns by exporting reports from the customer dashboard menu against the following touchpoints:

• Spend Amount of Customers(s)
• Focus on Single or Multiple Cities 
• Select Zone-Wise Locations and Sections
• Choose from Multiple Device Types
• Haven’t Ordered Since XYZ Time Period

The above filter options can fine-tune your SMS campaigns so that you’re able to target those audiences that haven’t been ordering in higher frequency from your restaurant. In addition to SMS marketing, the above data can also be used for marketing restaurant services through Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc.

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Integrated Social Media Marketing Stats:

Restaurant business owners who sign up for an account with Blink, get access to integrated Facebook, Google, and Instagram analytics. These restaurant data analytics can be accessed via a dedicated dashboard that eliminates the need for business owners to switch back and forth between their business social media pages.

You can get a quick overview of sales trends, post engagement, customer buying patterns, customer segmentation over demographics, and vice versa over a centralized virtual location.

Enabling Restaurants with our Feature-Rich Solution during COVID

With Blink your restaurant business has multiple options including receiving live orders, pre-orders & orders through phone. We understand how important it is for restaurants and specific product offering to have a good number of reviews to promote confidence in your offering. That’s why with Blink’s Ordering Platform for Restaurants you get a pre-built reviews system that enables receiving quality feedback on your items on the go.

In addition to this, some of the differentiating features that Blink offers to our restaurant clients include:

• We enable restaurants to segment their product catalog along sections and items. That’s not all – with our Branch-Wise Toggle you can even bi-furcate specific sections & items within your product offering along separate branches you might be operating.
• Blink’s online ordering platform for restaurants includes built-in promo codes & bulk sections discounts. In simple terms that means that you can not only apply individual promo offers on specific product items – Blink enables discounts on entire sections of your product portfolio. This does not just save time but helps restaurants build sections like “Special Deals” where all relevant products can be grouped together.
• Sick of third-party aggregators not providing your restaurant business access to your customer’s contact credentials? You don’t need to fret any further. With Blink, you have access to your complete customer database with important details like phone numbers, email addresses, ordering history, and much more.
• Blink comes with a build-in module that facilitates Facebook Retargetting campaigns as well. All you have to do is export your customer sheet from Blink’s Dashboard & import that sheet in your Facebook Business Manager. Yes!!! Having control and access to your precious customer data is that easy now.
• How good would an ordering platform for restaurants be without some solid analytics? Yes – without numbers you can’t go far. Keeping this in mind, our solution provides restaurant data analytics that you can access to check not just your top-level numbers and KPIs but you can drill down & do a deep dive to understand which segments, sections, items, branches, and channels are working well for you. Scaling successful models could not have been easier!

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Conclusion

As you can see, restaurant data analytics doesn’t have to be complicated or scary for anyone looking to operate a food business during COVID-19.

There is no question that data analytics play a role in the day-to-day operations of any business. However, when it comes to restaurants, data analytics can be especially important.

All you have to do is keep a track of the results and make adjustments accordingly. With profits as thin as they are for the restaurants, utilizing data analytics for restaurants available can help increase your overall revenue and become more efficient.