Marketing
Takeaway Marketing Ideas UK: 15 That Work in 2026
Most takeaway marketing advice is written for restaurants with a marketing manager and a five-figure budget. This list is written for the owner who is also the chef, the delivery co-ordinator, and the person who locks up at midnight. Fifteen ideas, each one costed in pounds and hours, ranked from free to serious, with the UK compliance rules flagged where they matter. None of them involve paying a platform 30% to rent your own customers back.
One principle runs through everything below: marketing spend that builds a channel you own beats marketing spend that feeds someone else's marketplace. If you want the raw numbers on what owned ordering saves, the commission savings calculator does the maths for your exact order volume in about 30 seconds.
Where the money actually goes: channels compared
Before the ideas, look at what each channel costs per £15 order and who keeps the customer relationship afterwards. This table decides where your effort should go.
| Channel | Cost on a £15 order | Who owns the customer | Repeat-order power |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uber Eats / Deliveroo (full service) | £4.50 to £5.25 | The platform | Weak: they re-market every rival to your customer |
| Just Eat (marketplace, own delivery) | £2.25 to £2.85 | The platform | Weak |
| Your own app or site | roughly £0.53 (Stripe + 10p) | You | Strong: push, loyalty, order history |
| Walk-in and phone | Staff time | You, but no data | Medium: no way to reach them later |
UK figures, 2026. Platform commission 15% to 35% depending on tier; own-channel cost assumes Stripe at 1.5% + 20p plus a 10p Aexir order fee.
Five ideas that cost nothing
1. Fix your Google Business Profile properly
For most UK takeaways, more customers find you through Google Maps than through any paid channel. Yet most profiles have a wrong opening time, three photos from 2019, and no menu link. Spend one hour: correct hours including bank holidays, upload 10 recent food photos, add your ordering link as the primary website, and seed the Q&A section with the five questions customers actually ring you to ask.
2. Build review velocity, not just review count
Google rewards recency. A shop with 40 reviews from the last six months outranks a shop with 200 reviews from 2022. Ask at the counter at handover, put a QR code on the receipt and the bag sticker, and reply to every review within 48 hours. Target 10 new Google reviews per month. That is one ask per busy evening.
3. Post at hunger hours
Social posts about food work when people are hungry. Schedule for 11:30 and 16:30, not 21:00 when you finally have a quiet moment. A phone photo of tonight's special at 16:30 beats a designed graphic posted at midnight.
4. Use WhatsApp Status and broadcast lists for regulars
Your 50 most regular customers already message you. A WhatsApp Status with tonight's special, or a broadcast to customers who have saved your number and agreed to hear from you, costs nothing and lands in the one app every UK customer opens daily.
5. Claim every free listing
Google, Bing Places, Apple Maps, your Facebook page, and your local council's food hygiene listing link. Twenty minutes each, once. Consistent name, address, phone, and ordering link across all of them is a ranking signal and stops customers landing on a dead Facebook page from 2021.
Five ideas under £100 per month
6. Digital loyalty stamps
A paper stamp card gets lost in a wallet. A digital stamp card sits in the same app the customer orders from, and it nudges them when they are one stamp away from a free meal. Repeat customers spend more per order and order more often; the loyalty page walks through the stamp and points mechanics Aexir ships as standard.
7. Push notifications on your quiet nights
Every takeaway has a dead night, usually Tuesday. A push notification at 16:45 with a Tuesday-only deal reaches every customer who installed your app, for free, in seconds. Shops running weekly quiet-night pushes typically turn their worst night into a mid-table one within two months. One rule: maximum two pushes per week, or people switch them off.
8. A QR insert in every single bag
Print 5,000 cards for roughly £60: one side says "Order direct next time and skip the fees", the other has a QR code to your app and a first-order code worth 10%. Every platform order becomes an advert for your direct channel. This is the single highest-leverage piece of print a takeaway can buy.
9. Give £5, get £5 referrals
Word of mouth is already your biggest channel; pay it. Existing customer shares a code, both sides get £5 off their next order over £20. Your cost is £10 of margin for a new customer whose lifetime value is in the hundreds. Compare that with the £4.50 you hand a platform on every single £15 order forever.
10. A 30-day win-back message
A customer who has not ordered in 30 days is drifting to a rival. An automatic push or email ("We miss you, here is 15% off this week") recovers a meaningful slice of them, and it runs itself once set up.
Five ideas that take real effort but compound
11. Own your ordering channel
Everything above works twice as hard when the destination is your own app rather than a marketplace listing. A branded iOS, Android, and web ordering channel with loyalty and push built in costs a flat monthly fee, not a percentage; the pricing page has the full numbers. For a shop doing 40 direct orders a day, the difference against 30% commission is over £60,000 per year.
12. Short-form video of the food, not of you
TikTok and Instagram Reels reward the sizzle: cheese pulls, the fryer, the doner knife, the tikka coming off the grill. Film 10 clips in one evening service, post two per week. Local food content travels: UK takeaway clips regularly reach 50,000+ local views with zero ad spend. Put your shop name and town in the first line of every caption.
13. Partner with the places that order in bulk
Offices, sports clubs, schools on match days, taxi ranks, and night-shift workplaces. One A4 menu with a bulk-order deal, hand-delivered to 20 local workplaces, takes an afternoon. A single office that orders £80 every Friday is worth £4,000 a year.
14. Build an email and SMS list you are allowed to use
UK PECR rules matter here: for consumer marketing you need consent, or the soft opt-in (they bought from you, you told them at the time they could opt out, and every message includes an unsubscribe). Collect emails at checkout in your own ordering flow, then send one offer email per month. Owned list, zero cost per send.
15. Deliberately convert platform customers to direct
Keep Just Eat or Uber Eats as a discovery channel if it brings genuinely new customers, but treat every platform order as a one-time acquisition cost. The bag insert (idea 8), a loyalty stamp head start ("scan this and start with 3 stamps"), and a first-direct-order discount together move regulars across. Shops that run this playbook typically shift 60% to 80% of repeat orders to their own channel within six months.
Compliance in one line: consumer email and SMS marketing in the UK needs consent or the PECR soft opt-in, every message needs a working unsubscribe, and bought consumer lists are off limits. Business-to-business rules are looser, but takeaway customers are consumers.
The 30-day version for an owner with no spare time
- Week 1: Fix Google Business Profile, claim the free listings, put a review QR on receipts. Three hours total.
- Week 2: Order 5,000 bag-insert cards with a direct-order QR and 10% first-order code. One hour to design and order.
- Week 3: Start the two-posts-per-week hunger-hour rhythm on one social channel only. Film 10 clips in one service.
- Week 4: Launch the Tuesday push-notification deal and the give £5 get £5 referral. Measure everything against last month's takings.
Marketing works better when the channel is yours.
Aexir gives your takeaway a branded app with loyalty, push notifications, and zero commission, from £1 a day.
See your savingsCommon questions answered.
The highest-return moves for most UK takeaways are a properly maintained Google Business Profile with steady review velocity, a QR insert in every bag pointing customers to your direct ordering channel, and a digital loyalty programme with push notifications. All three build channels you own rather than renting visibility from a 30% commission marketplace.
A common UK benchmark is 3% to 5% of turnover, but for an independent takeaway the first £100 per month is better spent on print inserts, a loyalty programme, and your own ordering channel than on paid ads. Paid social only makes sense once your Google profile, reviews, and direct-order funnel are fixed, otherwise you pay to send people to a broken journey.
Sometimes, as a discovery tool. A platform promotion can introduce new customers, but you pay commission on the discounted order, so margins are thin to negative. The play that works is treating the platform as paid acquisition: run the promotion, then convert those customers to direct ordering with a bag insert, loyalty head start, and a first-direct-order discount.
Give them a reason and a route. The reason is a first-order discount plus loyalty stamps they can only earn direct. The route is a QR code in every bag, on every receipt, and on the counter, pointing at your own app. Shops running this consistently move 60% to 80% of repeat orders to their own channel within six months.
Build your own restaurant app.
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