Why does an online store have few sales? Mistake #8 – an online restaurant didn’t know how to increase customer LTV and suffered losses

A series of mini-cases about critical mistakes of online stores that prevented sales and profit growth. One case – one mistake. Today we will tell you how an online sushi restaurant launched unprofitable advertising and received a DDR of 63% per client. There was no LTV development and one-time sales did not recoup investments in contextual advertising.

Client:

An online Asian restaurant in the mid+ price segment. The main hit of the menu is sushi made according to classic and signature recipes. The company was founded by a brand chef who decided to work for himself and launched his own online store. He made an appetizing website and invested money in contextual advertising. But the project did not bring the desired income, and the DRR (share of advertising expenses) per client was constantly increasing.

Error:

The advertising strategy was aimed only at one-time purchases. Attracting one buyer cost 1517 rubles, and the average bill was 1850 rubles. It was necessary to retain, return guests, turn them into regular customers in order to recoup the investment in attracting them. But LTV (the company's profit from one buyer over the entire period of cooperation with him) was not increased.

Implications for business:

Customers made an average of 1.3 orders per 3 months. And within this cycle, the DRR per customer was 63%, which was unprofitable.

How it was fixed:

First, we needed to understand the intentions of consumers. We conducted a small survey of users on the site using a regular Google form. To encourage completion, we gave a promo code for dessert for completing the form. And the contacts we received were added to the guest database of the online store.

It turned out that users are ready to order sushi and other Asian dishes 2-3 times every three months. We offered the client a cascade system of stimulating the return of new guests to increase their LTV.

We set up separate advertising campaigns to return customers. We adjusted the rates for the target audience that had already made purchases in our online store. We also launched retargeting with targeting for those who had already purchased.

We needed to return guests 15 and 30 days after their last purchase. So we set the sales dates in the companies: 15 and 30 days ago.

We created complex retargeting conditions. For example, made a purchase in the last 16 days, but did not visit the site for the last 13 days. This way, we kept the audience active in the most converting 3 days from the last order.

The offers invited people to try new items on the menu or informed them of a secret 10-15% discount on dishes they had ordered earlier. Moreover, the discounts were limited in time, usually 1-2 days.

Result:

Thanks to our optimization and the advertising focus on returning a loyal audience, the average bill increased by 30% from 1850 rubles to 2405 rubles. And the number of orders per visitor increased to 1.9 in 3 months. The DRR per customer was reduced from 63% to 31%.

If you are planning to attract more clients, we can do audit your contextual advertising, find new growth points and build a sales scaling strategy.