Affiliate Marketing for Restaurants

The concept of affiliate marketing is simple; brands and businesses pay ‘affiliates’ a commission to promote their product or service.

It’s certainly not a new method of reaching customers and it works both online or offline. You will have seen examples of affiliate marketing through major companies like Avon or Amazon. These companies run their own affiliate programme and manage all aspects of this marketing channel. However, for many businesses there aren’t always the resources or the need for an internal affiliate marketing platform. Instead, an affiliate network is used as the middle-man between the publisher (affiliate) and the retailer/merchant (often referred to as the advertiser).

Affiliate Networks

A merchant will join an affiliate network and set-up a campaign to attract affiliates to promote their offer. For example, a cake company that takes orders online will pay a 15% commission to an affiliate who refers a sale. Based on the price of the cake and the brand itself an affiliate can decide if this is an attractive offer. An affiliate could be one the following groups:

• A blogger
• A social media influencer
• Another website
• A company who owns a list of email contacts

Good affiliate networks will vet their affiliates before they join, to check they have a genuine source of traffic and are likely to send high-quality leads and sales to the merchants on their network. Similarly, retailers will be need to be approved based on the quality of the brand, website and offer. Larger networks or industry niche networks will have more specific requirements.

One of the most attractive things about affiliate marketing is that it’s typically a risk-free process. Businesses are only paying when a lead or sale has been generated. Some larger affiliate networks will require a joining fee, but there are plenty of fee-free platforms too.

How Are Sales Tracked?

Affiliate marketing relies on the right affiliate being rewarded for their referral, so tracking that sale to the correct source is crucial for repeat referrals. The network handles all the tracking for the merchant, providing them with a unique pixel (piece of code) to be placed on their website. This is one of the benefits of joining an established affiliate network, as opposed to running your own internal programme. Affiliates are then given a unique link with which to promote an offer. When someone clicks their link, a message is sent to the pixel on your website identifying the source. There will never be any question over whether this marketing channel is profitable or not because every last sale is tracked.

Another method for tracking is the use of a voucher code. Instead of a link, an affiliate is given a unique discount code which they can use to promote to their audience. For example, 10% off a first order. When the sale is made, the network and the merchant can see which voucher code has been used and assign the commission accordingly.

How Could Restaurant’s Benefit From It?

By now you might be asking, how would this work for a restaurant? Well think about all of the restaurant review blogs out there, all of the social media influencers Instgramming’ and Snapchatting their food. There are an abundance of affiliates just waiting to promote your restaurant to their audience. Here you have a few options of how you can do affiliate marketing for restaurants:

Using a Discount Code on a first meal:
This is a good idea for new customers. When the code is presented you can ask for the customer’s details and add them into a database so you have a record of who has already used the code.

Commission for an Online Booking:
This would be more straight-forward, you could pay a flat fee for any bookings made online, or even a newsletter sign-up. This would have to be a low amount to account for the fact that some bookings might not be as large as others. The fee could be determined based on the number of people.

Commission for an Online Order:
Another straight-forward model, a commission based on the size of the order placed directly online. This would also be the easiest for an affiliate to promote and is likely to be the most popular. If you haven’t already got this functionality in place, we recommend taking a look at Livepepper to help you fulfil this area.

Digital Restaurant Cloud – Restaurant Affiliate Marketing

Digital Restaurant Cloud offer a unique affiliate marketing option through their restaurant booking solution. Their smart technology booking solution also allows you to learn more about where your bookings are coming from, therefore enabling you to measure the efforts of each marketing channel. Their platform can be white labelled so you can maintain the branding as your website throughout.

This affiliate marketing option is integrated within the platform, so you only benefit from this unique programme if you are utilising their booking solution. However, this means there are no network sign-up fees and you have a good level of control within the system.