How Poached increased app sales by 300% while saving $10,000 in 3 months with Open

I had a few goals for updating my online presence: 1) Give my customers a better ordering experience, 2) Grow sales, and 3) Reduce vendor costs. Open delivered on all that and much more!

Jim Papantonopoulos, Owner @ Poached Neighborhood Kitchen

Overview

Poached Neighborhood Kitchen is a 3 location breakfast, brunch, and lunch restaurant in Southern California. Since opening in 2017, they’ve become a local community hotspot loved by customers.

Challenge

Jim Papantonopoulos, Owner of Poached, was looking for a digital revamp. He knew his website wasn’t SEO optimized, didn’t love his current online ordering experience, and was using too many tools to manage and grow his online business (and paying too much for those tools, too!)

Jim already knew he wanted to move away from his current tech stack, but didn’t know where to go. He was worried about adding more work to his already full plate and hesitant to introduce new software that would require migrating a customer base of tens of thousands of people to a new system.

After some in-depth conversations with Jim, he entrusted Open to solve these challenges.

Open came to me with a plan to migrate all my existing customers and grow my sales. It was a leap of faith – and the big bet paid off. Customers are happy, staff is happy, business is happy! I thought it was going to be a lot harder than it was.

Jim Papantonopoulos, Owner @ Poached Neighborhood Kitchen

Solution

Because Open is a team of experts who have collectively driven over $1 billion in online sales to restaurants, we hit the ground running from day 1. Jim provided us with access to his Toast POS, Google My Business, Yelp, GoDaddy and other online accounts and we were off to the races. No lengthy onboarding process or tedious work for Jim — 10-15 minutes of his time was all we needed to get started.

Step 1: Build Poached a best in class mobile app, web ordering experience, and marketing website

The first thing we got to work on was revamping Jim’s mobile app, web ordering experience, and marketing website. We analyzed Jim’s menu and leveraged our software to determine which keywords we wanted to rank for from an SEO perspective to drive growth. In parallel, we started building his ordering system and mobile app with his Toast menu data. We developed table stakes features missing from his current ordering experience like Apple and Google Pay, real time delivery tracking, push notifications, smart upselling, and more.

Step 2: Create a strong campaign to get customers to order online and download the app

Open came up with an incentive (first order, free waffle) to drive conversion and new revenue. We coupled email and sms marketing with a small paid online ad budget, and saw immediate growth.

Step 3: Ensure customers retain and order more frequently

After acquiring customers, we wanted to make sure that the majority of them were coming back, using the app continuously, and ordering more frequently. All of those things were true, which ultimately has led to 300% growth in app orders and 29% online growth in sales in less than 3 months!

Replacing existing tools

Poached was able to replace 4 tools after migrating to Open, which resulted in more than $10,000 in software savings, while also reducing the complexity from managing websites, online marketing, SEO, and loyalty in different places.

‍