Guide
How to grow takeaway sales alongside your delivery apps
Step one
Promote the number yourself.
A new ordering channel is only as good as the number of people who know about it. Everything below is yours to control and costs nothing but attention.
Your own website
Put the number where the menu is, not buried on a contact page. Anyone already on your site is the cheapest order you will ever take.
The shop itself
Window, counter, menu boards. People waiting for a collection order are the most likely to use it next time.
Packaging and printed menus
Bags, boxes and leaflets go home with the customer. A number on the lid gets found at 7pm next Friday.
A QR code to your page
On the table, the counter or the menu, pointing at your Dial4.food page so people can see the menu and tap to call.
Your social profiles
Pin it. Put it in the bio. Mention it when you post a special, so regulars learn there is a direct way to order.
Messages people agreed to receive
If customers have properly consented to marketing from you, tell them. Taking a phone order is not consent on its own.
What not to do
- Do not take customer details out of a marketplace to market to them. Check what your agreements allow before contacting anyone.
- Do not interfere with a marketplace order or checkout, or try to divert a customer mid-order.
- Do not assume a phone order gives you marketing consent. It gives you the order.
- Do not promise something the kitchen cannot do at 8pm on a Saturday.
Step two
Know the difference between new and moved.
There are two kinds of order on a new channel. Some come from people who would not have ordered at all, or who would have gone elsewhere. Others come from regulars who simply used a different route to reach you.
Both have value, but only the first grows the business. Moved orders can still help if the channel suits you better, though that is a different argument and needs different evidence.
The honest test is total orders and total sales across every channel, compared with the weeks before you started. If the total has not moved, the new channel has rearranged your orders rather than added to them.
Step three
Put your own numbers in.
Enter what you actually see. The calculator multiplies, it does not predict.
Dial4.food orders you actually fulfil in a normal week.
What a typical order comes to, as you enter it.
Share you believe would not have ordered another way.
- Monthly channel sales
- £2,166.67
- Estimated additional sales
- £866.67
- Would have come anyway
- £1,300.00
Illustrative gross sales, not profit and not a forecast. Food, labour, payment processing, delivery and Dial4.food charges are not deducted, and nothing here predicts how many orders you will receive.
Figures use 25 orders a week × 52 ÷ 12. If the order value you enter includes VAT, the results include VAT too.
A worked example
25 completed orders a week at £20.00 is 25 × 52 ÷ 12 = £2,166.67 of monthly channel sales. If you judge 40% of those orders to be genuinely additional, that is £866.67 a month of estimated additional gross sales. The remaining £1,300.00 is not additional sales in this scenario: it is business that would have arrived another way.
None of this is profit. Food, labour, payment processing, your own delivery costs and the cost of the channel all come out of it, and none of these figures is a forecast of how many orders you will receive.
Step four
A four-week pilot you can actually run.
Indicative measurement, not proof of cause. Too much changes in a restaurant month for anything else to be honest.
- Before you start
Write down the baseline
Total orders and total sales for the last four weeks, across every channel. Note anything unusual: a bank holiday, a promotion, a closure.
- Weeks 1 to 2
Promote the number properly
Put it on the website, the window, the packaging and your social profiles on the same day, so you know what changed and when.
- Week 3
Check the operation, not just the orders
Are orders arriving cleanly? Is the kitchen coping at peak? Are people completing calls, or hanging up part way?
- Week 4
Compare totals, not just the new channel
Put total orders and total sales next to your baseline. Allow for promotions, opening days and the time of year before drawing any conclusion.
Questions owners ask
Is a Dial4.food order automatically extra revenue?
No. If the customer would have ordered from you through an app anyway, the order has moved channel rather than added revenue. That can still be worth doing, but it is a different claim, and it is the reason the calculator asks you to estimate what share is genuinely additional.
How long before I can tell whether it is working?
Four weeks of honest comparison is usually enough to see a direction, provided you allow for promotions, seasonality and anything unusual in the baseline. It is an indication, not proof of cause.
Can I text my Just Eat or Deliveroo customers about my own number?
Not on the basis of a marketplace order. Those customer relationships and any marketing permissions sit with the platform under your agreement with them, and UK marketing rules need proper consent. Promote to people who came to you directly and agreed to hear from you.
What should I do if the kitchen cannot cope?
Slow the promotion down before the food suffers. A channel that produces late orders is worse than no channel, and capacity is a fixed constraint that no ordering technology changes.
Next: how the channel sits alongside Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Just Eat, or what a quote covers.
Try it on your own menu.
Book a demo, hear a call end to end, and decide whether it is worth promoting in your shop.