Whether you own a propane delivery business or you delivery gourmet meal kits and recipe cards to your customers every week, the market is saturated with other people trying to do exactly what you’re doing. Here at Delivery Biz Pro, we want to see your business succeed, and that means ensuring that you remain competitive in your home delivery market. There are countless ways to do just that, but in today’s blog, we’ll be discussing ten of them.

Keep reading below for 10 important tips that can help you stay ahead of the competition in your key home delivery industry, including how DBP can help.

10 Tips For Surviving In The Home Delivery Market

1. Understand What Your Customers Need

The first tip we can offer for surviving in your home delivery market is to understand what your customers need. Depending on your industry and your location, this can mean a lot of different things. For example, a local milk delivery service in one town might be all about convenience, whereas in another town it might be all about supporting local farmers, knowing where your food comes from, or finding natural and organic alternatives to what you’ll get in the store.

Do some research to determine what your target or existing demographic is and use that knowledge to understand how to best provide for that demographic’s needs, whether it is through the products you offer, how your market your business, or the extent to which you provide your services.

2. Understand Your Competition

It will be very difficult to remain successful without understanding your competition. Discover what makes your competition successful. What do they offer that you don’t? How are they marketing themselves? Depending on where you are providing your services and how saturated the market is in that location, you may find that your competition is currently the only option that potential customers have for a particular service, or you might find that they have a lot of options and choose a particular company for a reason. Once you understand what makes your competition successful, you can pinpoint weaknesses in your business and work on improving those areas.

3. Off A Variety (If It Makes Sense For Your Industry)

Obviously, propane and water delivery might not have as extensive of a “menu” as a farm-to-table produce delivery company does, and that’s okay. You don’t want to overcomplicate things, after all.

That said, if you are in an industry that caters to variety, make sure you offer that. Milk delivery, for example, can offer various types of milk such as skim, whole fat, or fat-free. They can also expand their offerings to include other milk-based products like cheese and butter. They might even recognize what their customers enjoy about a home milk delivery service and offer farm-fresh eggs, homemade jams, and other common products that families need in their kitchens.

Meal kit delivery companies can provide a wide range of recipes to meet dietary restrictions for their customers. They might offer vegetarian or gluten-free meals. They might also cater to specific cultural needs and provide certified halal or kosher meals. While you don’t want to offer more variety than your business can handle, providing a little something extra can make your business model more well-rounded and ready to serve a wider variety of customers.

4. Provide Easy Options For Your Customers

This is where those more straightforward industries, such as water and propane, can shine. Make sure to remain flexible in your delivery service. Perhaps some customers need propane or water delivered every day, where others might only need it once a week. Some customers might need their items dropped off on a certain day of the week.

Using a home delivery software like ours, you can easily create delivery options that your customers can take advantage of without causing any stress or frustration for yourself.  

5. Have An Online Marketplace

Nearly two full decades into the twenty-first century, your business simply cannot survive without an online presence. Your website is more than just a website — it’s a marketplace for your customers to browse, add items to their cart, and subscribe to your service. The more user-friendly your website is, the better. Customers are more likely to trust a website that looks modern and is regularly updated as opposed to a website that looks like it hasn’t been updated since the turn of the century. Having a great website can significantly reduce bounce rate — a term used to describe when a customer opens a website, sees something they don’t like, and immediately bounces right back to their Google search to find your competition.

At Delivery Biz Pro, we have a team of webmasters and designers who can create the perfect website to capture your business. Our websites are included with your home delivery software service and our designers will make sure that your website represents you and your business in a sleek and modern way. More importantly, our websites are mobile-friendly, meaning that if someone is searching for your business on their smartphone (and they are), they will open up a website that seamlessly reacts to their small screen.

6. Market Your Business

If you have the best website in the world and the best service, that still might not be enough to gain new customers. While word of mouth can sometimes earn you an extra customer here or there, it’s certainly not enough to survive in the competitive home delivery market.

Make sure that you know how to market your business and employ the expertise of professionals if needed. It’s okay if you can’t do everything yourself, and finding an expert can help you reap even more rewards.

7. Keep In Touch With Your Customers

The last thing you want is for your customers to become complacent or to forget that you are even there. Maybe a customer will pause your services for a few months while they are going through a big transition. That customer shouldn’t fall through the cracks, but you also cannot be expected to keep up with every single customer.

That’s another area where Delivery Biz pro can help. Our home delivery software allows for automated email communication for countless situations. Whether you want to automatically send customers an email wishing them happy birthday, remind them about items left in their carts, inform them about outstanding payments or deposits, or offer them a refer-a-friend discount, we make it easy to do that.

8. Choose The Right Location

Home delivery companies can be small and serve just a local community or they can become international corporations. Wherever your home delivery service falls on that spectrum, it is important to know how large of a territory you can handle. If your delivery radius is too small, you might not have enough subscribers to outweigh operation costs. If it is too large, you might be overwhelmed with orders or your delivery expenses will be too high. Finding the sweet spot for your industry, revenue, and expenses is key and may take some trial and error. It is usually recommended to start small and scale up.

In terms of location, it is also important to consider the type of people who live in your delivery radius. Perhaps the demographics of the town you operate in doesn’t align with the demographics of your customers and you would find more success targeting a neighboring town or city.

9. Provide Accurate Service

This is one of the elements that often make or break a home delivery company. Inaccurate deliveries aren’t only a pain in your customer’s neck, they are also a pain in yours, too. The larger your company becomes, the more difficult it will be to make accurate and timely deliveries for every single customer. However, it is far from impossible. Just look at Amazon!

Utilizing a home delivery software from the early stages of your business can help ensure that customers’ orders are delivered on time and with the correct items. Our home delivery software seamlessly integrates with your custom website as well as a host of other features. Using the route management feature, your drivers can feel confident in the deliveries they are making while also having the power to make necessary changes on the road.

10. Have Competitive Prices

Finally, you need to make sure that your prices are competitive. If you are in an area without any direct competition, you might think that the sky is the limit with your prices. However, there is a point where a customer would rather make a trip to the propane store and put a full propane tank in the backseat of their sedan than pay an outrageous amount for a convenient propane service.

If you don’t have any competition in town, find out how much similar companies in other regions charge for their services. If you do have competition, make sure to price your service accordingly. If you have an edge over the competition that leads you to believe your service is worth more, make sure to convey this to your customers so they know what they are paying for.

Additionally, taking steps to reduce your overhead costs can help you keep your prices low. There are many ways to do this, but one of the main ways simply comes down to efficiency. How efficiently can you run your business? For example, with a route management software like ours, you might find that you don’t need as many delivery drivers as you once thought.

Find Out More Ways DBP Can Help

Above are just ten tips you can utilize to keep your home delivery business successful, but they are not the only tips by a longshot. The best way to survive in a competitive home delivery industry is to ensure you have all of the tools you need to successfully run one. Using a home delivery software like Delivery Biz Pro can make the logistical side of running your business easy so you can focus on other aspects like marketing, growing your service area, and sourcing your products.

If you’d like to learn more about how Delivery Biz Pro can help you find success in your delivery market, then reach out today. We’d love to hop on the phone and discuss your business’s needs and your goals and find the right solution for you.