Fancy a takeaway tonight? You wouldn’t be alone.
The Molle family have been operating the popular Dublin-based Macaris takeaway for the past 25 years. Here, we ask Fabio Molle from Macaris to share his knowledge of effective online and offline marketing for a successful takeaway business. This includes advice on everything from traditional printed takeaway menus to a fully responsive website with online ordering service.
Tell us about Macari’s Takeaway?
Macari’s is a family run takeaway with an established delivery service based in Glasnevin, Dublin. My family have been running it for over 25 years. It’s located very near one of Ireland’s biggest universities, Dublin City University and is popular with the students. Our online delivery service caters for a wide range of areas from Glasnevin, Drumcondra, Ballymun, Finglas, Whitehall and Santry.
Have you faced any challenges along the way? How did you overcome challenges?
There have been many challenges along the way, more so the later years. Increased competition from competitors who drive down prices make business very tough. Previously the only places to get food was limited to takeaways but now one can get food in shops, supermarkets, petrol stations and there are so many different types of food available now which gives people more options and it pulls them away from the traditional takeaway. Also we had a big fire in 2011 and we were closed for 12 months. It has taken time to win back customers.
Who eats in Macaris?
We get a good mix of customers. During the university year we get in students and they tend to travel in groups which is great. We get in young and old families. We also have generations of families who have lived locally for years and we know the grandparents, their kids and the grandchildren. Its makes a great friendly atmosphere.
What’s the secret to the success?
It’s a family run business and people recognise this. A lot of hard works goes into having great fresh food all the time and keeping the premises spotless. We love catching up with our customers and we are like friends to all of them. It’s like one big happy family!!
What online marketing tactics do you use?
Recently we have started to use Snapchat (Macaris1) and it works great with the younger generation. It’s a great tool to stay in touch with your relevant customers and have direct contact with them. It’s tough to be on it all the time but we try our best. For the older generation we use simple email and have spent the last year trying to grow our email list so we can keep our customers informed of our new deals and special offers. Tools like Mailchimp are a great partner to small family run business. They provide some great tools which help us collect email addresses and then help get our message out to them.
Tell us more about your website?
Our website at Macaris.ie was setup in-house with Squarespace. It a great tool that helped us build a simple and clean website which is responsive. We use Zuppler to host our online order system which sets all orders to in store terminal.
As a food delivery business, what print collateral do you invest in?
Our most important marketing tool is the printed takeaway menu. A well-designed takeaway menu entices our customers to try our food and generates orders. Leaflets are also a big part of our business to help get our message into people’s house. We put leaflets inside delivery bags or post door-to-door locally. We use Macaris branded stickers to promote our Snapchat channel. The stickers make a fantastic branding tool; simply adding one to a bag gets your business noticed before the takeaway delivery is even opened.
Lately, we are using printed booklets for managing all sorts of records from incoming deliveries to outgoing deliveries, to temperature control to waste. There is so much to record. Everybody says we should use a laptop or iPad but with a few different things going on at the same time in different locations, multiple iPads is not financially feasible and sometimes can be slower to use that simple pen and paper! Before we would have used photocopied sheets but this works out more expensive and is not neat.
What’s your experience of ordering print online from DigitalPrintingIreland.ie?
DigitalPrintingIreland.ie is fantastic. It gives us the opportunity to print things that are normally so much more expensive and normally require a larger minimum order. We’ve got various different stickers printed, booklets for different reports that we keep. The new printed material we get from DigitalPrintingIreland.ie has really helped better manage parts of our business. Also, the turnaround time is really quick and normally arrives sooner than expected!!
DigitalPrintingIreland.ie
Our experience makes us the perfect partner when it comes to printing takeaway menus, stickers and flyers. You can do this all online! Simply upload your artwork to our website and let us help with all your hospitality printing requirements, making your job and life easier! Check out DigitalPrintingIreland.ie or contact us today and find out how we can help.
