Taking your hospitality business online with Bopple opens up great opportunities to grow your reach and boost sales through effective marketing and smart strategies. With practical tips and real-world examples, this guide will help you make the most of your online menu and maximize your success.

If you haven't finished setting up Bopple yet, visit our guide on Setting Up Bopple to walk you through the essential setup process. 

What’s in this guide?

What you'll need
Add mouth-watering descriptions
Add drool-worthy images 
Promote on social media 
Order Online button 
Add your menu to your Google Business listing 
Place QR codes strategically 
Get inventive with QR displays 
Expand your offering 
Adding Facebook's Pixel to Bopple 
Seamless loyalty and rewards 

What you'll need

• A Lightspeed POS and Bopple plan.
• A completed online menu.
• Your online menu URL.

Look and feel

You eat with your eyes, so the way your menu looks is important. Think of it as plating- while it doesn’t impact the taste of the dish, it affects the overall experience and how good the customer perceives the food to be. 

Add mouth-watering descriptions

Sharpen your quill and flex your creative writing skills. Add descriptions to each product so that you can sell the sizzle out of your products. 

Is it light, refreshing, and zesty? Do ingredients come from local suppliers? Does it pair well with something else? Let your customers know through your sumptuous product descriptions. We love the personality Custard Canteen has injected to bring a mere burger and chippies to life.

This guide will walk you through how to set up customer-friendly names and descriptions in your Lightspeed Back Office, which will sync to your online menu. 

Add drool-worthy images

The saying An image is worth one thousand words is especially true when it comes to selling online. Does your menu look so enticing that customers can’t help but buy more? 

Here are some examples to inspire you and show you what you could be aiming for: The Rum Diary Bar, Sweet Meadow, Acai Brothers.

Photos, not an option? Free icons or simple color blocks will do the trick! Check out two real-world examples from Royals and Soul Burger. Images should be optimized for a square ratio.

Got the perfect image, but it doesn’t fit to size? You can use the ResizePixel Chrome extension to resize, crop, optimize, or convert your images.

URLs everywhere

Having your menu online, with its URL, means you can put it in front of anybody, wherever they are, giving you more eyes on your products, and expanding your customer base and reach, which means more potential sales coming through your door.

Find your menu’s URL from the Bopple Back Office, then share it widely to reach your customers. 

Promote on social media

Grab your online menu’s URL and add it to your bio on social media with a little text saying Order here. Simple as! Some of your smooth movers may already have a linktree, where you can connect your followers to a list of your content with just one link.

Now, it’s on you to drive traffic to the link. A few examples of how you could do this:

• Share a story showing how to order online.
• Make a post with a review from one of your customers about their ordering online experience.
• Reach out directly to Bopple to get branded Instagram Stories, like the one below, to help you promote online ordering. In any posts or stories, don’t forget to mention Link in Bio!

Order Online button

Got a website? Embed your menu behind an Order Online Button on your website. Most websites will have a portal that you can use to manage the content on the site. Either you or your web developer can add a link that opens your web ordering page in a separate tab.

You can either choose to follow your own website’s theme settings or you can read through this guide to add a Bopple button anywhere on your site.

Add your menu to your Google Business listing

Engage with customers on Google for free. Your Business Profile lets you easily connect with customers across Google Search and Maps. See how Sonoma puts their menu front and center, meaning customers are only a click away from ordering.

Check out this Google guide on how to set it up: Add or edit your menu URL

QR codes for days

It’s almost unbelievable to think that QR codes were barely used before 2020. Now even your Granny knows what to do when they see a QR code! Whether you have your fulfilment types set to Pick-up, Dine-in, or Delivery, you can add sparkles and pizzazz to your QR codes. 

Place QR codes strategically

Placing a printed QR code in your window is a given. If you fancy some Guerrilla-marketing style tactics, why not place a poster with your QR code further down the street? 

Our customer, The Forest Blend Cafe, is located by a gym, and with the gym’s permission, they place their pick-up QR code in the changing rooms, with Skip the Queue! the text above and a pic of a coffee cup. They waft the smell of freshly baked croissants through the vents, and it’s like shooting fish in a barrel! 

Get inventive with QR displays

We can’t be certain if this next point has any effect on the sales figures, but we strongly suspect it adds a little something to the customer experience. While printing out your QR codes on laminated A4 certainly does the job, jazzing up your QR codes is a great way to show your flair. 

Brewed As Collective has lasered their table-service QR codes into blocks of wood.

Extras for experts

Using tech and thinking outside of the box, you can design a whole digital experience that outshines your competition and leaves a lasting memory with your customers. 

Expand your offering

A Menu doesn’t have to consist of just food and drinks. In the examples below, you will see how some of our customers really think outside of the box with their products and services. 

Our friends at Continental Deli sell gift cards for their store online. These are perfect to send as a gift to anyone you know who lives in the area or is expecting to visit. 

Or, be like Barbetta, who sells retail goods online. Now that’s how you do eCommerce without having to pay for an additional eCommerce store. 

Finally, here’s a staff favorite from OI Izakaya. Shout the kitchen a beer, or Shout your server a beer. Tipping delivered through an online experience!

Adding Facebook's Pixel to Bopple

The Facebook Pixel is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website.

You can use the Pixel to:

• Make sure that your ads are shown to the right people: Find new customers or people who have visited a specific page or taken a desired action on your website.
• Drive more sales: Set up automatic bidding to reach people who are more likely to take an action that you care about, such as making a purchase.
• Measure the results of your ads. Better understand the effect of your ads by measuring what happens when people see them.

Once you've set up the free Facebook pixel in Bopple, the pixel will fire when someone takes an action on your website. Examples of actions include adding an item to their shopping basket or making a purchase. From there, you'll be able to see the actions that your customers take. You'll also have options to reach those customers again through future Facebook ads.

Learn how to add Facebook Pixel to your online store. 

Seamless loyalty and rewards

Prepare to go to loyalty-reward nirvana. Bopple integrates with Marsello, which makes it easy for Merchants to create a loyalty program where customers can earn points and effortlessly redeem rewards for discounts during checkout, both in-store and online.

Our friends at Chat Thai experienced a dramatic uptick in the redemption of loyalty points. 

After launching the integration of Marsello & Bopple, they experienced a 375% increase in reward redemptions.

Enable the Marsello Integration and sign up for an account to get started. There is no cost to integrate, but you will require a Marsello subscription.