Restaurant Marketing Unlocked: How to optimise your restaurant’s website design to boost bookings

Is your restaurant website working hard enough?

In the next of our Restaurant Marketing Unlocked series, we’re bringing key marketing insight that will help inform your restaurant’s website design.

We take a closer look at how optimising your website’s capabilities will ensure you’re securing regular bookings once reopen.

Appetising website design

Heard of the phrase ‘Hangry’? Customers aren’t very patient when they’re hungry, so your website will need to be stress-free for users to browse your menu, book a table and place their order online to ensure they don’t choose a competitor over your restaurant.

Your website will need to load quickly – ideally in less than 2 seconds to satisfy the 47% of users who expect this online. It will also need to immediately instil a sense of authenticity amongst customers, with research by Blue Corona finding users decide in less than 10 seconds whether they trust a company based on the design of their website.

Hungry for online ordering

We touched upon how online ordering can be easily set up and branded in our previous Restaurant Marketing blog looking at how to plan your new menus.

Integrating online ordering into your website doesn’t have to be costly or difficult, there’s plenty of options out there to choose from. It’s just about finding the platform that best works for your business.

By integrating online booking or menu ordering systems into your restaurant’s website design, it reduces face-to-face contact. Some of these systems also have the option of creating an app, allowing customers to choose a platform that works best for them.

Making the most of your website

With in-app or online ordering, you’ll be able to gather details on the most popular dishes to help streamline your menu, whilst collecting customer data. If you’re able to gather consent for marketing at the point of sale, you’ll also be able to use this customer data for campaigns in the future.

Although there is a high volume of consumers ready and waiting to dine out, you may have customers who still want to enjoy your food but do not feel ready to eat in public.

With an online booking system in place on your website, you can extend the service and open up a new revenue stream to cater for click & collect and delivery orders as well as in-house diners.

Consider encouraging customers to pre-order meals and how you might stagger your collection times to avoid too many people queuing outside your restaurant.

In our latest whitepaper ‘How to get your restaurant open for business within the current government guidelines’, we delve deeper into ensuring your website is optimised to maximise bookings and how to choose the right online ordering platform for your restaurant.

Why this will benefit your restaurant

Analysing your current website and making changes to maximise table bookings or click & collect and delivery orders, will ensure your restaurant has multiple revenue streams in the future. By optimising your restaurant’s website design you will:

• Offer another revenue stream through online ordering, click & collect and delivery
• Ensure diners feel comfortable browsing and ordering from your menu via your website or app
• Be able to promote your brand story and what makes you unique
• Collect customer data to be used in future marketing campaigns

Sound good?

Download our free whitepaper today to get the inspiration and insight you need to optimise your website to boost table bookings or click & collect and delivery. .