Ahead of a busy holiday season when consumers say prices and promotions are their top consideration for purchases and ~77 percent cope with their busy schedules by ordering from restaurants, Uber Eats is launching three new offer types and new personalized marketing tools to help merchants reach more customers, launch new promotions and maximize sales.
The San Francisco-based delivery provider says its new set of tools was designed to help restaurants gain deeper insights into their business and increase their sales in more scalable, efficient and flexible ways
With new, personalized marketing recommendations, merchants now have access to customized recommendations to ads and offers that will help them maximize sales. Restaurants can also take advantage of three new offer types: holiday happy hours, multi-location offers, and percent-off offers to attract customers who are hungry to save money.
“The holidays can often be a busy and stressful time for restaurants, who balance demand from hurried shoppers, seasonal parties, and large families orders,” said Manas Mittal, senior director of product management at Uber. “Our team has been hard at work creating important new tools and offer types to help restaurants maximize their sales and reach more customers.”
According to the McKinsey study cited above, U.S. shoppers are feeling better than they were this time last year, even as uncertainty about the economy continues. Compared to the previous holiday shopping seasons, consumers started earlier and are shopping later than they did last year.
In addition, of consumers who started their holiday shopping in October, only about a quarter of them have completed more than half of their holiday shopping, “leaving plenty of room for retailers to reach these shoppers through the end of the year.”
The National Restaurant Association research also mentioned showed that 57 percent of consumers plan to go out to eat at a restaurant during the holidays, with 50 percent planning to order takeout or delivery for a gathering at home during the holidays.
From Uber, here’s how the new promotions work:
‘Holiday’ Happy Hours:
- For a limited time during the holidays, restaurants can run daily happy hour specials (including their best seasonal items) during off-peak hours and increase their visibility, in a curated Happy Hour section for consumers.
- Whether it’s pies and chocolate chip cookies, or casseroles and family-sized sides, restaurants can attract new consumers by creating discounts on their entire stores.
- To apply holiday happy hours, merchants can sign up via Uber Eats Manager.
Multi-location offers:
- To-date, nearly 50 percent of US&C Uber Eats Manager (UEM) users manage multiple locations through UEM.
- Now with multi-location offers, merchants with up to 200 locations can create offers at multiple locations to reach hungry consumers during the holidays.
- This new offer functionality will now make it easier than ever for merchants to create marketing campaigns for multiple locations at once.
- To apply multi-location offers, merchants can go to the ‘Marketing’ tab in UEM and select “Create campaigns.”
- Then, select any offers that apply to the basket level.
Percent-off offers:
With percent off offers, merchants now have the ability to offer a percentage off their entire store (i.e., up to 30 percent off store wide discount)
- *Certain items like alcohol may be prohibited from discounts, depending on the law.
- This new offer type provides greater choices for consumer discounts, allowing merchants to tailor offers to their business goals and provide consumers the ability to apply discounts to any part of the menu.
- By offering store-wide discounts, merchants can encourage customers to spend more and generate larger average basket sizes.
- To apply percent-off offers, merchants can go to the ‘Marketing’ tab in UEM and select “Percent off offers.”
Personalized marketing recommendations:
- With Grow Your Store (GYS) recommendations, merchants will now receive personalized advice on which marketing campaign to run next.
- This comes at a crucial time for many merchants who have previously expressed it can be challenging comparing and evaluating options to achieve their goal – which is primarily to increase sales and/or profits.
- To receive personalized marketing recommendations, merchants can go to the ‘Marketing’ tab, where we’ll analyze their current marketing and recommend new advertising opportunities or offer types, based on their business goals.
