Top 10 Restaurant Promotion Ideas on Food Delivery Apps

Setting the right menu prices is a critical decision for any restaurant owner. While discounts may initially seem risky given the tight profit margins of the industry, savvy operators understand that strategic promotions can drive sales growth and drive lasting customer loyalty.

In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of delivery focused promotions and share actionable ideas tailored to food delivery apps. Additionally, we’ll explore how Revly’s marketing software empowers restaurants to optimize ad spend and drive up the effectiveness of delivery app marketing across the board.

Why choose delivery app promotions for your restaurant marketing strategy?

Delivery apps offer restaurants access to a vast customer base, along with unique, performance-driven marketing options designed specifically for the industry. These tools allow restaurants to create goal-oriented promotions that are much more effective than traditional marketing strategies.

Choose delivery app marketing promotions if you are looking for:

Increased Visibility: Promotions and sponsored listings boost your restaurant’s placement within the app, making it easier for customers to discover your menu.

Customer Acquisition and Retention: Tools like first-order discounts and loyalty programs help attract new customers while encouraging repeat orders from existing ones.

Data-Driven Insights: Delivery apps provide detailed analytics, enabling you to refine promotions and target the most effective strategies for your audience.

In recent years, restaurants have shifted much of their marketing spend from traditional channels like Facebook ads and PR to delivery apps. Why? Because delivery app promotions generate measurable revenue, making them a more effective and reliable investment.

How to Create a Promotions Strategy for Your Restaurant on Food Delivery Apps

Before jumping into executing any promotion ideas, build a strategy tailored specifically for both the food delivery apps you're operating on, and the type of menu / restaurant you run.

Different promotions and discounting types impact different business metrics - so make sure your strategies are aligned with your goals, and you’ve made an assessment of the types of customer you are trying to reach.

1. Determine Your Business Goals

Tailor your food delivery app promotions to address specific challenges or objectives your facing. Clearly define what you want to achieve, such as:

Increase top line revenue: Increase orders with less focus on profit.

Expanding your customer base: Focus on first-time customers‍

Boosting average order value (AOV): Encourage upselling or bundling deals.

Improving customer retention: Launch loyalty programs for frequent app users.

Maximizing profitability: Prioritize promotions for high-margin items and optimize for profit instead of revenue.

Here's an example, If your goal is to increase customer retention, focusing on loyalty discounts or exclusive offers for repeat orders will be more effective than first-order discounts.

Choose promotion ideas that match your business goals to miss aligned post campaign results. For larger operations, buy-in across the business from C-Level and other managers might also be required to ensure expectations are correctly set. 

2. Analyze Your Profit Margins

Effective food delivery promotions should grow either your top or bottom line and definitely never end up in a loss. Before running any offers start by understanding:

High-margin items: Promote dishes that yield greater profits.

Minimum order thresholds: Require a minimum spend to unlock discounts or free delivery, ensuring that promotions lead to profitable sales.

Break even points: Calculate what contribution margin you need to break even and impose strict limits on campaigns that don’t turn a profit.

Tip: Use delivery app analytics to identify top-performing menu items and sales trends to guide your promotion choices.

3. Understand Your Customer Base

Tailor your delivery promotions to the preferences and behaviors of the customers that you are are delivering to. Always analyze the following before launching food delivery marketing campaigns.

Price sensitivity: How willing are users in your area willing to pay full price for your menu?

Ordering habits: Identify peak ordering times, popular dishes, and frequently bundled items.

Geographic trends: Consider the difference in food preferences in different delivery locations.

Demographic trends: Family focused neighborhoods have different behaviors to say areas with a lot of office workers.

App audience: Delivery apps have different audiences depending on your location. If your trying to target a particular type of customer or menu item consider which app the promotion will work best on. 

Use the insights and analytics tools provided by food delivery apps to track customer behavior and refine your approach. Experiment with different types of offers, and be ready to pivot if a particular promotion isn’t achieving your goals.

Delivery apps often provide detailed analytics to help measure campaign success and you should always use these features to remove as much guesswork as possible.

By taking a strategic approach to your food delivery promotions, you can maximize their impact while keeping your restaurant’s profitability in mind. A thoughtful plan ensures that your efforts are efficient, targeted, and aligned with your business goals.

10 Effective Promotion Ideas for Restaurants on Food Delivery Apps

1. Promotions for First-Time Delivery Customers. First time user discounts reliably drive new users to your restaurant. Enable first time user discounts through your delivery app’s marketing platform and the app will push your discount to only users who haven’t ordered before.

2. In-App Ads and Sponsored Listings. Use CPC ads in delivery apps to improve visibility and drive more orders to your restaurants. Often called Promotions or Sponsored listings, this type of ad boosts your restaurants to the top of the app and you only pay when someone views your menu.

‍3. Bundle Deals and Combos for Delivery Orders. Create value meal bundles or combos exclusive to app users. For example family sized combos or large orders aimed at the Friday lunch time office crowd.

‍4. Offer Free or Discounted Delivery. Run limited-time promotions for free delivery on orders over a minimum spend. Highlight this deal during peak meal times or holidays as a quick way to appeal to customers against the competition.

‍5. Seasonal and Event-Specific Offers: Create promotions around holidays, seasons, or sports seasons. Bundle menu items around themes, and even consider creating brand new menu items for events. For example: Iced drink specials over the summer months.

‍6. Encourage Repeat Orders with Loyalty Discounts. Discounts are effective for customer retention, not just new user acquisition. Try exclusive discounts for existing customers on delivery apps to improve loyalty.

‍7. Partner with the App on Campaigns: Many delivery apps run regular promotions that restaurants can join to boost their orders in the short term. These often have primary screen real estate in the app so can be very effective. Often these campaigns involve deep discounting so make sure your food cost and contribution margin metrics are on point before jumping in.

‍8. Promote High-Margin Items Through Exclusive Discounts. Preserve more profit by creating deals on items with higher profit margins. These types of campaigns are usually called menu item offers in delivery apps.

‍9. Increase your Organic Ranking for More Visibility. Delivery apps use ranking algorithms to show your restaurant in the list. Make a coordinated effort to improve key delivery app metrics to boost your restaurant higher and attract more new customers.  

‍10. Spike revenue with 50% discounting. Strategically use deep discounting to spike new user acquisition and revenue. This promotion type gets fast results but also can impact brand perception so closely monitor your performance data to execute this campaign effectively.

How to Optimize Food Delivery Promotions wih Revly

As competition has increased on delivery apps, many brands are now looking at ways to get an edge and optimize their way to more profit.

Revly is delivery app marketing software that aggregates all your delivery app promotions into one place. Streamlining all your data and making choosing the right promotions a lot easier and more powerful.

Unlock powerful optimization options that can dramatically improve results.

1. Target specific times of the day. Use day-parting technology to run promotions when it matters most. For example run discounts in non-peak hours or increase CPC bids in peak hours for maximum effect.

2. Optimize for delivery location. Adjust your promotions per location or delivery area and experiment with different promotion types depending on the type of customer you are targeting.

3. Optimize for profitability. Start tracking marketing contribution margin from your promotions rather than just ROAS. Contribution margin allows you to compare profit between campaigns and make decisions that drive more profit.

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Case study example: Sauce Capital increases ROI by 3X

After managing all their promotions manually across multiple delivery apps Sauce Capital chose to partner with Revly to streamline all their marketing into one place and start unlocking the potential of all their performance data.

The team at Sauce was able to get deep insights into all their in-app campaign activity and use it to inform better decision making when it came to allocating spend.

Using automated meal period targeting enabled on the Revly platform, they were able to improve performance on ads and discounts by 3X.