5 Tips to Improve Your Food Delivery Service—and Your Bottom Line

Today more than ever, people are ordering their meals from a food delivery service. What’s more, many of them are tired of having only limited choices such as Chinese or pizza. This is especially true if they have a favorite local restaurant.

But you, an innovative entrepreneur, have taken the initiative and set up a restaurant food delivery service. You are doing okay, but you want to find ways to improve your service. You just don’t know where to start. Here are a few tips to improve your food delivery service and raise more revenue at the same time.

 

RELATED ARTICLE: QUESTIONS TO ASK AS YOU START A FOOD TRUCK BUSINESS

 

1. Review Your Delivery Area

You’ve already mapped out a radius of delivery around your base of operations. Now it’s time to review that map.

The first thing you want to look into are how many new restaurants have started. Are any of them local, non-franchise ownerships? Make a list of these and plan to reach out to see if they’d like to add your food delivery service.

The next thing to review is the size of your delivery radius. If your size is too big you’re probably taking longer than you expect to make deliveries. You don’t necessarily have to reduce your delivery radius. However, you might consider adding another base of operations to handle some deliveries, especially if a certain quadrant is getting a lot more requests than others.

On the other hand, is the opposite true? Is your radius too small? Can you possibly expand your radius and still provide excellent service? Either way, it’s important to review your delivery area.

 

2. Consider Your Delivery Hours

When you gather the information about peak delivery times, a few questions you might ask yourself are these:

• Is there a time when your deliveries are nonexistent?
• Do evening deliveries outpace your lunch deliveries?
• Are there holidays when you see a spike in requests?
• How many bars are in your delivery area?
• Would it be a good idea to try to have longer hours for delivery that include the times shortly after the bars close?

Answers to these questions could lead you to make changes to your business. For instance, you might decide to hire more drivers to accommodate peak delivery times. Or you might extend your hours to see if delivering food after the bars close is feasible.

Of course, you would want to consider the insurance expense of such changes. Discuss this with your insurance agent to make sure your drivers are safe and covered.

 

3. Join Associations

While excellent, on-time delivery service is your main goal, your main customer isn’t the one who orders the food.

No, your main customers are the restaurants you deliver for. They trust you to know their industry and to understand their needs and pain points. Their trust is critical to growing your independent food delivery service business.

For that reason, it’s important that you join professional associations in your area. If you live in a large city, find state or city restaurant associations. You can also join national associations such as the Restaurant Marketing & Delivery Association (RMDA) or the National Restaurant Association.

And don’t forget about joining your local Chamber of Commerce and Small Business Association chapters, as well. These organizations will be great resources. They will help you to keep up to date on best practices for restaurants and the latest ideas for your food delivery service. They’ll also give you wonderful networking opportunities that will help you to grow your business.

 

 

4. Review Your Marketing Materials

Marketing is constantly changing as buyers’ needs change and evolve. Last year’s marketing techniques that gained you lots of new clients might being fizzling out as people become more aware of you and your services. So review your marketing plan and consider updating it.

Take a look at your website, too. Look at your statistics, for instance with Google Analytics, to see what your peak visit times are and where most of your visits are coming from. You can also determine which pages website visitors look at most, and consider removing those pages that don’t get much traffic.

While you’re there, update your content. It’s always a good idea to update content on your website regularly. If you’re in the food delivery industry, that means you might want to host an updated menu from a popular restaurant. Or you could offer discounts on your services to those restaurants that don’t get a lot of requests. By helping drive business to restaurants, you’ll gain their appreciation and loyalty. And your revenue will rise, as well.

 

5. Do Something Different to Stand Out

This is always something a lot of business owners don’t consider, because they feel if something isn’t broken, then they shouldn’t try to fix it. While that’s mostly true, there are some ways to make your delivery business stand out from the crowd.

If you’re doing robust business and you want to have your delivery service noticed more, especially if you work and live in extreme weather states, consider using commercial truck rentals. You could arrange to have a fleet of vehicles with your logo and business information right on the vehicle.

Compare this to the practice of most companies, which make their drivers use their own vehicles and add a topper attached to the roof. While these are fine for pizza delivery or fast sandwich companies, if you really want to stand out among food delivery companies, consider having your own fleet of vehicles.

There are many other ways to stand out, too, so look at other businesses that have nothing to do with restaurants or food delivery and see what they’re doing. Is there a way you can modify those practices to revolutionize your local food delivery service?

 

Delight Your Customers by Improving Your Food Delivery Service

No matter how long you’ve been in business, it’s always a good idea to grow your business by finding ways to improve. Whether it’s your operating practices, your delivery area, or your marketing techniques, improving the way you do business will delight your customers, bring loyalty to the restaurants you serve, and help you gain more restaurants to expand your reach and raise your revenue.

The post 5 Tips to Improve Your Food Delivery Service — and Your Bottom Line appeared first on Business Opportunities.

source http://www.business-opportunities.biz/2017/12/28/improve-food-delivery-service/