Food Delivery Referral Program Examples: Dah Makan

Dah Makan is a Kuala-Lumpur-based food delivery service that brings healthy meals to the doorsteps of busy people quickly and easily.

Founded in November 2014 by foodie Jessica Li, entrepreneur Jonathan Weins and techie Chris, Dah Makan set out to give busy individuals a convenient and delicious option when thinking about what to eat.

In-house chefs use the freshest ingredients to prepare meals from a daily changing menu, so customers can make Dah Makan an everyday option without tiring of the menu.

Thus it's no wonder many of their customers know about the brand through word-of-mouth.

To be exact, 4 out of every 100 purchases comes from referrals!

We spoke to Jonathan Weins and asked him about their marketing challenges, improving their customers' experience, and their success using ReferralCandy.

First, some background on the company:

• Team of approx. 60 – 15 in the kitchen, 30 riders, 5 working on the business end, and a tech team that's working on their upcoming mobile app.
• Orders are all made through their website, but Dah Makan is about to release a smartphone app to make it more convenient for customers to order.

“What are the top things that you care the most about?”

1. "Preparing and delivering the most amazing food, so we can create the best experience and most convenient product for our customers."
2. "Learning what our customers like and finding out how we can continue to wow them."

Of course, when a friend recommends a service to you and they are using this service almost daily,this kind of personal advocacy resonates much stronger than seeing a Facebook ad with a nice food picture.

“What are some examples of things that you do to enhance your customers' experience?”

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"First of all, feedback is extremely important to us.

We try to be as close as possible to our customer, in order to understand their daily life and how we fit into that.

For us, it’s all about continuously improving and understanding what people like. So, if you order today we’ll send you a feedback form or try to meet with you to really understand what you liked about the food, what you might not have liked and how we can make the experience a little bit more convenient for your next order."

"Can you tell us what your customer base like? What proportion of them are repeat customers?"

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"Actually, most of our customers are extremely loyal. The majority of customers orders several times per week and there are many people who order daily for lunch and for dinner, for themselves and even for their family.

If you look at our website, we have two dishes every day for lunch and dinner.

We want to create a product that you can use daily. Therefore, expectations are high in terms of quality and consistency of the experience.

Most of our customers have high spending power and are well-educated and travelled so word of mouth is and referrals the best for us. We don’t believe that customers acquired through daily deals sites like Groupon would be the most effective marketing channel for our product.

Currently, most of our customers order more than 3 times per week.

Our goal is to become your trusted meal provider from which you will order 5, 6, 7 times per week. Like your own private chef."

“Why did you start using ReferralCandy?”

"We currently use Shopify so I was looking in the app store for a useful marketing tool that could easily integrate into our existing platform.

After trying a few others, it was clear to me that ReferralCandy is the best: It was very easy to set up and pretty clear to use, on top of that, it offers many ways to customize the communication with our customers - exactly what we need!

After the free trial, we were hooked!

We conducted a lot of customer interviews and almost everybody said, “I heard about it from my family/friend/from my spouse/from my colleague”.

So we knew word-of-mouth was very powerful and having a referral scheme was basically a way to give a small treat to people who referred us."

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Next: Referral Program Examples – An Epic List of 47 Referral Programs