Some restaurants are not aware of what happens when one of their customers makes a booking on their website so we thought we would go through the process so that everyone understands the process and the implications for your restaurant.
A few weeks ago a colleague made a booking at a restaurant in Chapel Street for lunch. They were using Dimmi, and used their widget to make the booking. On arriving at the Restaurant, they weren’t able to seat us, so we hope they weren’t charged for the booking of 4.
What happened next is the most interesting part of the process and highlights the concerns that restaurants should have. Our colleague started to get emails from Dimmi offering 50% off food for restaurants in the area.
The email below had a 50% off food offer for a restaurant at lunch just 5 kilometres away.
This is the scary part of sharing your customer’s contact information with Dimmi.
They booked for lunch and received an offer for 50% off the food for lunch at a restaurant just 5 kilometres away.
Dimmi knows when and where your customers like to eat and market to that. We believe that Dimmi’s offering is a way for diners to find restaurants to eat at and they use restaurants for service fulfilment. Dimmi actually charge restaurants to give away their contact details. In general $1 per seat booked through the restaurants website and $3 from their network. Restaurants should be happy to get a booking through the Dimmi network, because it may be a new customer, but paying to share a customer’s contact details seems very counterintuitive.
These offers are especially destructive for customer loyalty. In this case, a full fee paying customer is offered a 50% off coupon to dine at a competitor around 5 kilometres away. This makes it incredibly hard to build customer loyalty and why we recommend using Book A Table to take your online bookings.
We built Book A Table to help restaurants save time by taking bookings online, to build their own database with a list of customers and to save money. This is why we offer it for free for our website customers and just $49.95 per month for everyone else. We never share your customer’s details with anyone. We believe that your customers details are one of your businesses most important assets and as such should never be shared. Book A Table enables restaurants to cut out the middle man, save money and stop sharing their customers details.
If you take bookings for your Restaurant, you should ditch the old fashioned book and start taking bookings from your own website. This is one of the quickest ways to build a restaurant marketing database. Taking Restaurant bookings online allows you to take bookings 24 hours a day, cuts down on errors, saves staff time and best of all, it builds your Restaurant Marketing Database. Don’t use an online Restaurant Booking system that charges you to take bookings from your own customers, and never share you customer details with other customers. With our Free Online Restaurant Booking System, taking restaurant bookings online has never been easier, and like FROLO, best of all it’s free.
Our FORBS has taken over $15,000,000 worth of bookings for Restaurants.
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Is Poor SEO Killing Your Restaurant?
Too many times we see customers with websites that are costing restaurants thousands of dollars every month through poor design, poor messaging and poor SEO. If your website could be improved to bring in 200 extra visits per month and just 10% of those made a booking, and each booking was for 2.5 seats on average at $50 a seat, you would have an extra $2,500 in revenue a month. A 30% food cost, that is $1,750 in profit extra a month. This ignores those customers coming back as regulars – which is more profit.
Remember, if these customers aren’t finding your Restaurant, they are finding your competitors.
Get one of our obligation free 7 point website SEO audits to see what you can get your web developer to fix to increase your revenue today.
“Restaurants should be happy to get a booking through the Dimmi network, because it may be a new customer” – I would contest this, I have seen Dimmi pay for ad words to appear above a restaurants own website and also have one of their links on the restaurants own Google Places listing, meaning that people that are looking specifically for the restaurant they want to book can end up booking through the dimmi network and costing the restaurant significantly more… Google Hugos Manly Restaurant to see what I mean…
Hey Paddy, yes, definately if they are buying adwords, then it won’t be a new customer. You can request that the stop doing it or pull out of the network. This can be Brandjacking. Menulog is notorious for buying adwords to drive customers to fake websites that appear to be the website of the Restaurant, when in reality it is just a 1 page menu done by Menulog.
The click baiting from companies like Dimmi is definitely an issue. As the business model has been proven to be less profitable, we are seeing less of this, what we are seeing a lot of though is companies like Menulog and Eat Now running brandjacking campaigns to websites which they set up. This is a pretty major issue for Restaurants.