Just-Eat has appetite for using social media to acquire and retain customers
Social media is proving to be a fertile method of both acquiring and retaining customers for take-away food ordering website Just-Eat that is on a mission to shift the primary way of ordering food from the telephone and onto the internet. By Glynn Davis
The objective for the UK arm of Just-Eat is to convert as many take-away diners away from using their phones to order from the 11,000 local delivery restaurants that it has on its books because its business is very much based on a volume model – taking a cut from each order taken on its site.
Tess Tucker, head of digital marketing for Just-Eat, is due to present at the forthcoming 3rd Retail Bulletin Customer Loyalty Conference 2012 in London on June 13th and ahead of the event highlighted how the business uses social media as part of its strategy for growth.
As it seeks to acquire customers she says Just-Eat has been running TV advertisements as well as some London-based promotional activity on the Underground network that “generates awareness of the brand and for this type of service as we are in high acquisition mode”.
Never Miss a Retail Update!But this is complemented by the use of social media including Facebook and Twitter, with the former used as an advertising medium – undertaken on a cost-per-click basis – as well as a source for attracting fans who have clicked the Just-Eat ‘like’ button and are either existing customers or are deemed to be potential customers.
Tucker says the company posts a message daily on Facebook – that is picked up by its fans on their feeds. These messages are a mixture of competitions, exclusive discounts and other items that are primarily designed to “entertain”. “We try not to do too much marketing as it’s more about a dialogue. We want the brand to be at the forefront of people’s thinking,” she says.
The number of other people that pick up on the message will clearly determine the success of the particular message sent out, which can often be down to the day and time that they are posted.
However, she adds that the constant tweaks Facebook makes to its platform can make measuring success difficult: “Sometimes it works in mysterious ways. One thing will work well but not the next time and you don’t know why. It’s all part of the fun of doing social media. It’s digital marketing and it keeps you interested. We therefore keep experimenting.”
Despite this uncertainly, Tucker is confident of the overall success of using social media. “When we do a lot of activity on Facebook we can see the correlation with orders taken. This gives us confidence in it.”
The company also includes a survey in the ‘welcome’ email that it sends to new customers asking them how they found Just-Eat and Tucker says social media ranks well in the findings.
Hard evidence of its success can be seen from the fact Just-Eat now has around 400,000 fans compared to the lesser 250,000 at Christmas. Many of these are, Tucker admits, at the younger end of the market – aged 18 to 35-years-old. Which she says fits well with the “light-hearted nature of the brand that lets us be creative and not restrained”.
However, she admits that Just-Eat is lucky in that its service potentially appeals to all demographics in all parts of the country, which may have played a part in it this month raising $64 million from venture capital investors.
Although this funding will help Just-Eat acquire smaller rivals that offer a similar service to itself it will continue to use social media for organically boosting its customer base and for retaining those existing fans of its service – who typically use it to order a take-away per month.
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