10 Reasons THIS Is The Best ChowNow Alternative

1. 300% More Sales At Checkout

The single biggest reason that restaurants switch from ChowNow to Owner.com is our ordering and checkout experience.

ChowNow’s checkout experience converts around 3-5% of visitors to your website.

That means that if you do enough marketing to send 100 visitors to your website, only 3-5 of them will purchase.

Owner.com converts 10-25% of visitors to your website.

That means that those same 100 visitors will result in between 10-25 sales... an average of 300% more than ChowNow.

When you actually look at the ordering experience for both companies, it’s easy to see why there’s such a massive gap in average sales.

Here’s what a ChowNow ordering experience looks like:

There’s no pictures. There’s no social proof. The categories are hidden. There’s no upsells or messaging prompts.

Here’s what an Owner.com ordering experience looks like:

And this is just the beginning.

Not only do more customers purchase through our online ordering system, the average amount they spend on each order (AOV) is notably higher as well... and it keeps going up every few months as we test and roll out improvements.

This is partially due to our exceptional user experience, but it’s also because we frequently attempt to “upsell” customers throughout the ordering process — strategically inviting them to add high-margin items to their cart.

We upsell on individual item pages:

We upsell when people click to checkout:

And we upsell throughout the checkout experience:

Our design and development teams are constantly working on improving this experience, because our #1 metric at Owner.com is the average sales volume of our restaurant partners. Everything we do is designed to make you more money.

The last round of updates we made to checkout increased average order value (AOV) by 17% across all the restaurants using Owner.com!

17% sales bump... overnight.

Plus, we don’t just increase your sales at checkout.

We also increase how many people find your website in the first place.

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2. Automated SEO Marketing

The second biggest reason ChowNow users switch to Owner.com is that we do a lot of marketing for you.

But not in the way you’ve seen before.

A lot of tools promise to throw in extra services to sell you on their software. But the service is an afterthought. It’s not their core business, and they don’t take it seriously.

We don’t offer marketing as a service, because if we did, we’d end up doing the exact same thing.

Instead, we’ve strategically built marketing into our software and onboarding process.

We do all the one-time things that need to be done for you during onboarding.

For example, we make sure your homepage is optimized for the most strategic keyword connecting to your business.

Ottavio’s Italian Restaurant is located in Lakeside, California. As the name suggests, it’s an Italian restaurant, and in looking at keyword search volume, we identified “best italian in lakeside” as the most popular keyword connected to their cuisine type.

We optimized their Google listing and homepage to reflect that.

As a result, they very quickly ended up ranking for this keyword in search:

And their sales went up as a result.

But that one page is the easy part. You could do that yourself.

Here’s where we really move the needle on your behalf.

We built our software from the ground up with this in mind. When you use Owner.com, every single item on your menu gets its own page and is then ranked for that specific dish term.

That means that when people search “shrimp alfredo lakeside”, they find Ottavio’s at the top as well.

No other tools do this.

And this is why Ottavio’s doubled their takeout and delivery business after switching to Owner.com.

But guess what?

It keeps getting better... because SEO isn’t the only type of marketing we do for you automatically.

3. Automated Email Marketing

Once you have a customer's email, the single best thing you can do to get them back into your restaurant is to email them once per week.

I probably don’t need to convince you of that.

The problem for most restaurant owners is that sending out a weekly email takes up too much of their time and attention. Plus,other priorities are always higher up on the list, and email marketing just never happens.

What should be a simple, weekly process that drives growth for the restaurant... is instead another item on a long list of stuff you wish you had time to get to.

Once again, instead of slapping on a weak service to try and sell you on working with Owner.com, we asked ourselves, “How can we permanently solve email marketing for our restaurant partners?” and then we built that into our software.

There are two parts to this.

The simplest part is that we have created a collection of “evergreen” emails that you can automatically send out to your customers using our platform.

Emails like this:

And this:

We have enough of these emails in the queue that your customer won’t see an identical email until after around two months, and to be honest, they will have completely forgotten about it by then.

The goal here isn’t to be cute or creative.

The goal is simply to remind them about your restaurant, which will automatically result in them visiting you again.

And it works!

Customers who are messaged weekly by the restaurant tend to increase their visits by around 50%.

But that’s just the first part.

The second part to this is a bit more complex.

Our software actually provides you with a world-class Loyalty Program to offer your customers, complete with incentives, tiers, points, rewards, and all the things people love about the programs from Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, and Dominoes.

We’ll dig into that in just a moment, but first, I want to mention that last type of marketing we do for you automatically.

4. Automated SMS Marketing

I know what you’re thinking...

“SEO, email, AND text marketing??? There’s no way you do ALL this marketing at the same time!?”

It’s kind of crazy, especially if you’ve experienced working with platforms like ChowNow, where you are one of 20,000 restaurants and can barely get a hold of support, let alone get help growing your restaurant.

To be honest, this is the least sophisticated thing we do at the moment.

We just send out a monthly coupon offer to your customers like this:

It’s simple, and we usually do a 15% off coupon, as that seems to be the sweet spot for getting people in the door while minimizing the margin lossed.

There’s a few things to keep in mind here.

First, there’s probably more that can be done via SMS marketing, and we are 100% going to be testing and experimenting with more complex strategies in the future.

Second, people open texts more than any other marketing collateral, BUT they don’t want to be texted often. Once per month might end up being the best case scenario for restaurants.

Finally, the most significant thing about our monthly SMS marketing campaign is that it’s one small part of a very strategic Loyalty Program that we provide for your restaurant. 

Let’s look at the full program.

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5. World-Class Loyalty Program

Independent restaurants have better food than national chains.

Everybody knows this.

So why don’t people eat exclusively at independent restaurants?

For one thing, national chains typically have better marketing. We’re doing our very best to fix that with Owner.com, and it’s a big reason we’ve devoted so much of our design and development time toward building in the automated SEO, email, and text marketing we just covered.

Second, national chains benefit from economies of scale and a focus on volume, and they are often a fair bit cheaper than local alternatives. There’s not much you can do about this, and in all honesty, there’s not anything you SHOULD do about this. You are the premium, higher-quality option in your area.

The third and final distinction is where things get interesting. National chains tend to have a better website, a smoother ordering process, and an engaging Loyalty Program designed to get customers back into their locations time and time after time.

And this is THE main thing we set out to provide when we started Owner.com.

We give independent restaurants all the online tools of a big chain. We’ve talked a little about the website and checkout experience, but now let’s talk about the Loyalty Program.

Imagine if you could have a Starbucks-quality Loyalty Program for your restaurant, complete with points, rewards, incentives, and an engaging customer experience that brings customers back to your restaurant again and again.

With ChowNow, you can’t. The best thing you can do is offer a membership that gives customers a discount on orders they were already going to place with you.

With Owner.com, you can.

Give customers points with every order, and make those points easy to track.

Provide rewards tiers that bring your customers back for better and better incentives.

And automatically integrate those rewards with the email marketing we are doing for your restaurant.

We’re also working on providing a dedicated app that you’ll be able to offer to your customers, further improving on the loyalty program experience!

6. Free Marketing Collateral

One of the big struggles that ChowNow users have is getting customers to use their online ordering system.

Just because it’s there doesn’t mean people are going to use it.

This is a big part of why we built automated marketing to attract customers to your online ordering system AND an automated loyalty program to bring them back again and again. 

Be we also go one step further, because it’s important for your bottom line that you get customers off high-commission apps like DoorDash, UberEats, and GrubHub as quickly as possible.

We provide free, physical marketing collateral for all our restaurant partners.

To begin with, we design, print out, and send 1,000 fliers for you to place in delivery orders from 3rd party apps. Here’s an example we created for Talkin’ Tacos in Miami.

When Talkin’ Tacos started using Owner.com, they were booking 90% of their orders through UberEats. Within three months, they had reduced that amount to just 45% using this flier strategy and booked $41,000 worth of orders through our platform, saving nearly $12,000 in fees.

This is the most important collateral that we send our restaurant partners today, but we are also constantly experimenting with new strategies.

We recently designed walled posters to get in-store customers ordering form you online:

And table tents, as seen here:

So far, restaurant owners using these two types of collateral have grown their Loyalty Program subscribers 2-3 times faster than they were before rolling out the collateral.

Now, obviously, you can go print stuff like this yourself any time, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a big team of restaurant experts in your corner, constantly thinking about, designing, and testing stuff like this on your behalf... then sending it to you FREE when it works, instead of, you know, simply looking for more ways to upsell you and squeeze every penny from you like every other big tech company?

7. Customize Your Menu & Website

One of the most frustrating things for restaurant owners is needing to change something on their website or menu and having to jump through a hundred hoops to make the change.

Not only do most platforms make these changes unnecessarily complicated, but you then have to make the same changes on a bunch of different sites.

With Owner.com, changes are quick, easy, and they automatically update all the key online places where customers find your menu.

Simply log in to your dashboard, select “Menu” and you can make all changes in one, convenient place.

Not only will this adjust your menu on your website.

It will also make changes wherever your menu is shown online, like Google.

You can also quickly and easily make changes to your website.

Take 100 extra steps off your plate by switching to Owner.com.

8. Manage Customer Reviews

Reviews are a mixed bag for restaurant owners.

You know good reviews can help your business.

You know bad reviews can hurt your business.

And you know the more reviews you get, the more good and bad will be included in that bag, regardless of what you do or how hard you work to impress your customers.

We spent a long time thinking about this at Owner.com, and we came up with a system that is a win-win for restaurant owners.

To start with, we help you get reviews from your customers that are submitted directly into our system and will only show up on your website. This adds social proof to encourage new visitors to place an order while they’re viewing your menu.

Positive 4-5 star reviews automatically post to your menu items.

You can then invite these customers to review you on a public site like your Google Business listing.

But what about negative reviews?

Negative reviews are held in a queue so that you can reach out to these customers and attempt to resolve the issue internally. Customers who have a problem that is satisfactorily resolved are often even more loyal customers than those who never experience a problem in the first place.

And if you can’t resolve the issue, the negative review is not displayed anywhere.

This way, you can increase positive reviews while filtering out negative ones. It’s a win-win for restaurant owners.

9. Recruit New Staff

Staffing challenges have always been a hassle for restaurant owners, and these challenges have escalated significantly over the last year.

Most restaurant owners have to go to third party job sites and recruiting platforms to simply post available jobs.

Owner.com lets you post your jobs, take applications, and promote hiring opportunities straight from your website.

It’s one less thing that needs an extra tool and an extra expense, and we’re working to incorporate our automated marketing processes to help you find and attract talent around the clock.

10. All Your Tools In One Place

Our goal at Owner.com is to give you all the tools you need to fight back against big tech and big chains — in one place.

Are you tired of needing a new tool for every critical function of your online presence?

• Online ordering
• Delivery 
• Email marketing
• Text marketing
• SEO marketing
• Review management
• Menu management
• Ad management
• Website management
• Loyalty program
• Staff recruiting
• Etc.

Owner.com lets you replace hundreds of tools and consolidate your online presence into a single, convenient location.

Our average partner is able to drop ten tools when they switch to us, saving thousands of dollars without even experiencing the fast restaurant growth that comes along with switching to our platform.

If you want to see what our platform can do for you, click below to schedule a demo.

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