By Nick Hucker, CEO, Preoday
There are around 10,500 fish and chips shops in the UK and the British love of fish and chips is still going strong, now enhanced by digital ordering. Bank Holiday weekends are always prime time for hospitality businesses as consumers flood into restaurants and bars to celebrate the long weekend. However, fish and chip shops should not neglect the staple demand of a Friday, and how this can be increased further when it’s before a Bank Holiday. Our client data shows that on an average Friday, a typical fish and chip shop makes around a 90% increase on orders and 75% increase in revenue from digital pre-ordering.
Fish and chip shops should expect an increase in business across the board from digital ordering. As an example, our client fishnchickn has seen digital ordering becoming an increasingly important sales channel. Mobile and online ordering now account for 13% of sales; this is rising month on month. The ease of exploring a digital menu has led to customers placing additional products in their online basket making the average order value 122% higher than walk-in takeaway purchases.
Fishnchickn also uses its marketing channels to make customers aware of upcoming promotions and special events, such as Bank Holiday discounts. To date its marketing efforts have been effective in driving clients to the service. A Web Wednesday email promotion achieved a marketing ROI of 28:1 and of the 201 people who have texted Fish to 66777 since the campaign started, 99 of them have since placed an order giving an SMS-order conversion rate of around 50% and at a per SMS cost of 4p.
Since launch, another client of ours, The Frying Squad has seen a growth in overall revenue due to bigger basket sizes and an increased number of repeat orders through the app and website ordering. On average clients have ordered 2.07 times each, bringing average order values to £14.52 and revenue per customer to £30.02, higher than non-digital purchases.
The upcoming Bank Holiday is something certainly for fish and chip shops to look forward to, particularly the Friday preceding it and these examples should be food for thought on whether business on those popular days can be grown further with digital ordering.
