Restaurant Email Marketing
Many of you will shake your heads when reading the title of this lesson. After all, you are in the restaurant business, not in the email marketing business, right?
However, let me tell you something that may shock you: you are in the sales business. If you don't sell your food and beverages, nothing else counts so you need to apply the same marketing and sales techniques than the rest of the business use.
Email marketing is one of the most effective communication and promotion vehicles in the Internet. 90% of Internet users and 56% of all Americans use email on a regular basis (source: e-marketeer Aug. 2006). Restaurants can benefit from email marketing because it’s fast, direct, cost-effective, and builds loyal relationships with your clients.
Restaurant email marketing is, perhaps, one of the lowest cost marketing vehicles available to the restaurant industry to book tables and build customer relationships. High quality email campaigns can deliver effective messages that drive action and clients to your restaurant.
Email marketing can be a tricky proposition. People hate email spam and often they delete any email that they don't think is useful or interesting to them. For your email campaigns to be truly effective, they must be managed properly and conducted in a professional manner.
Please read the article "Restaurant Email Marketing: Keep in Touch Regularly With Your Clients. It provides restaurateurs with some practical tips for conducting effective email marketing campaigns that maximize their return on investment.
However, let me tell you something that may shock you: you are in the sales business. If you don't sell your food and beverages, nothing else counts so you need to apply the same marketing and sales techniques than the rest of the business use.
Email marketing is one of the most effective communication and promotion vehicles in the Internet. 90% of Internet users and 56% of all Americans use email on a regular basis (source: e-marketeer Aug. 2006). Restaurants can benefit from email marketing because it’s fast, direct, cost-effective, and builds loyal relationships with your clients.
Restaurant email marketing is, perhaps, one of the lowest cost marketing vehicles available to the restaurant industry to book tables and build customer relationships. High quality email campaigns can deliver effective messages that drive action and clients to your restaurant.
Email marketing can be a tricky proposition. People hate email spam and often they delete any email that they don't think is useful or interesting to them. For your email campaigns to be truly effective, they must be managed properly and conducted in a professional manner.
Please read the article "Restaurant Email Marketing: Keep in Touch Regularly With Your Clients. It provides restaurateurs with some practical tips for conducting effective email marketing campaigns that maximize their return on investment.
My colleague and professional restaurant marketer Jon Orana wrote an ebook dedicated to restaurant email marketing.
The title of the ebook is "Restaurant Marketing On Steroids". It contains very comprehensive and no-nonsense approach to market your restaurant using email. It costs only $27 so you may want to check it out.
Just click in the Title to access to his sales page and read more about this product: Restaurant Marketing On Steroids
The title of the ebook is "Restaurant Marketing On Steroids". It contains very comprehensive and no-nonsense approach to market your restaurant using email. It costs only $27 so you may want to check it out.
Just click in the Title to access to his sales page and read more about this product: Restaurant Marketing On Steroids
Restaurant Email Marketing Tips
Only send emails to the customers who have requested to receive them. If they fill in your in-restaurant registration card, or they sign-in in your website, they want to be contacted by you. Don't add emails to your list that you get indirectly (because they send you an email asking you a question or registration, etc.)
Be consistent with your sending frequency. Pick a schedule, whether it is weekly, biweekly, or monthly as long as you are able to keep to that schedule.
In most cases, it is best to send emails Tuesday through Thursday. I've found that the best times of the day to send are just after the start of the day around 9:30am or just after lunch, around 1:30pm. It is best to avoid sending emails after 4pm or on weekends. This doesn't mean that you need to be there at these days and times sto send the emails, just program the time in your autoresponder program and they will send them for you.
Don’t use all caps or multiple exclamation marks within your subject line or body. Doing this will trigger spam filters. Also avoid using words like free, lots of exclamation marks, etc.
What is the purpose of your email? Judging by many emails I get, it appears that many businesses are not very clear about the end result they are after. If your purpose is customer retention, loyalty, top of mind awareness and/or driving repeat visits and sales, then you should have compelling reasons for your customer to return.
Do not send HTML picture/content laden newsletter emails with stories and recipes. These have typically lower ‘open’ rates. Not a high (ROI) Return On Investment! You should include these in your monthly or quaterly newsletter instead.
Stick to the basics. Make your emails short and sweet. Touch your clients' soul. Be personal. Let them know they are important to you. Invite them back and give them a good reason (even better if it is an emotional reason) to return to your restaurant. You must work to gain and keep their awareness about you and your restaurant.
Use your emails to ask your customers for their feedback. You should always ask for feedback about their experience at your restaurant. Ask them what can you do to improve your place, to make their dinning experience more enjoyable...
Create a survey and send the link in your emails. You can use a professional survey service such as SurveyGizmo or Survey Monkey to capture your customers opinions.
A great survey should capture the customers’ perceptions of the overall experience in your restaurant. How long did they waited? Were your front of the house staff (hostess and/or servers) polite and courteous? Were they knowledgeable? Would the customer request the same server next time? Ask questions about the competition: Where else do you eat locally? How do you compare in food quality, price, service, etc.
A great survey should capture the customers’ perceptions of the overall experience in your restaurant. How long did they waited? Were your front of the house staff (hostess and/or servers) polite and courteous? Were they knowledgeable? Would the customer request the same server next time? Ask questions about the competition: Where else do you eat locally? How do you compare in food quality, price, service, etc.
You must have a customer apology method in place. You must respond to your bad surveys. Responding personally to each and every poor survey is a real challenge. Not responding is bad business and will almost certainly ensure that your customers will never return. Offer them a compensation to make up for any wrongdoing that you or your staff may have done to them. If you can convert your critics into fans, they will be a much stronger advocate and positive spokesperson for your restaurant.
Surveys should also be combined with some sort of immediate "Thank You for taking the survey" offer designed to drive repeat traffic and sales. Perhaps a special discount or a coupon with a time limit to bring the customers back to your restaurant. Don't send coupons without expiration dates. People will forget about them or bring them to your place 3 years later when nobody remembers them anymore.
Do NOT include the coupon offers in your emails. You MUST INCLUDE COUPONS for your customers as a means to compensate them for their feedback. However your coupon offers should NEVER be included in the body of the actual email. Upload your coupons to a page in your website and point in your email a link to the coupons so the customer can download them. In this way, you have control over the coupon's expiration and can remove them from the server when feel like it. You don't want to have several months (or years) old coupons floating around in someone’s email inbox. You can create your own coupons or you can use the services of a company like USDiners.com.
USDiners.com will create e-coupons for you that you can display in your website, and they will also promote them in theirs so your restaurant will get more exposure to more potential clients. Also they don't have long-term contract, recurring charges, or up front set up fees. You may want to check them out.
USDiners.com will create e-coupons for you that you can display in your website, and they will also promote them in theirs so your restaurant will get more exposure to more potential clients. Also they don't have long-term contract, recurring charges, or up front set up fees. You may want to check them out.
Do not mention in your email specifics about the coupon. Just say that they can download a coupon from http://www.YourRestaurant.com/Coupons and let them find out the details of the coupon directly from your site. In this way, you have the flexibility to modify the coupons (by increasing or decreasing the offer) depending on how many customers you are getting.
Do not send an email BLAST. An email blast is an email to all your list at the same time. This is NOT an effective way to utilize emails for a restaurant as it can cause customers to flock to the restaurant and ovwerwelm your staff. This may sound good but it isn't. Specially in these slow days, if you get a lot of people at the same time your wait times will be long and your service level will go down. There is no opportunity to proactively staff and plan. Try to stagger the emails so that you can spread them out every month. You can create separate lists for this, specially if your email list is very large.
You can create autoresponders to email your subscribers every week, or by-weekly, etc. In this way, you don't have to time when to send your emails.
It's OK to send Blasts mails for special events such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentines, Thansgiving or Christmas dinners, wine dinners, etc. when you are expecting a lot of customers and are ready for them.
Make your emails as personal as you can and use your name. The customer wants to connect and feel special. Make it personal! They MUST feel special and connected with you and your restaurant.
Don't over email. Once a week should be enough, more and people will star removing themselves from your list and again, make your emails compeling. If you don't have some interesting information to share or some event or compelling offers for your clients, then just skip a week and email the following one.
Make the process of subscribing and unsubscribing from your list very easy and straightforward. People shouldn't belong to a list if they don't want to.
If you don't have a good email solution or are still using your regular email such as Outlook, Outlooks Express, Hotmail, AOL mail, Yahoo mail, Gmail, etc. I strongly recommend you that you move into a professional restaurant email marketing and autoresponder system.
Please read the article "How to Select a Reliable Email Marketing and Auto-Responder Company".
Please read the article "How to Select a Reliable Email Marketing and Auto-Responder Company".