Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective solutions for small- and medium-sized businesses. It is a highly targeted method and very effective due to which all restaurant owners should include email marketing within the marketing plan of the restaurant and should make it a regular method of attracting a large number of customers. Email marketing may sound complicated and expensive initially, but all it requires is sending emails to a subscriber base of potential and existing customers with information about your latest offers and news. It is quite simple once you master the basic idea and develop it into a full-fledged email marketing campaign.
Why email marketing is powerful
It is a very inexpensive method of marketing your restaurant even if you include the time invested, you will still get a marketing method that is much cheaper, much more effective and extremely well targeted in comparison with most other marketing techniques. The people you send the emails to are those who have purposefully subscribed to your list and this is the reason that they are well targeted as they have already shown interest in your restaurant. Sometimes they are past customers and in fact your most loyal patrons along with prospective customers who are looking for special offers before they dine at your restaurant. They would anyway be happy to visit your restaurant and some special offers will encourage them more to do so.
Benefits of an email marketing service
While collecting email addresses and sending mass emails may sound easy, when you look at the logistics of adding recipients to the email manually it seems more time consuming than it has to be. If you use a specialized service, you will see that your emails are able to reach more of the recipients you intend to send to. This happens because an email-marketing service staggers your mails and will send only to a manageable load at one time, and then move to the next batch as compared. This is much faster and simpler than trying to send to many thousands of recipients at one time. This is the reason that specialized email marketing services are becoming increasingly popular nowadays.
With the help of an email-marketing service, it is also possible to manage your subscriber list with a user friendly interface and provides statistics on who subscribed, when they subscribed who unsubscribed and more. This makes the task even easier and ensures that the time you spend in writing emails is well spent formulating creative marketing language instead of spending it in managing the technical aspects of similar marketing methods. With these services, it is also possible to easily modify the email design templates which give you the freedom to position your restaurant branding easily within the email.
How to make optimal use of email marketing for restaurants
In spite of all the benefits of email marketing for restaurants, it is the most poorly used marketing tool. However, you can change that if you are in charge of the marketing of your restaurant and are a good communicator. These factors are sufficient to lay the foundation of an excellent email-marketing program for your restaurant. Remember that you have to keep in mind that creative ideas are not enough and you need to consider the following tips in order to be successful with your email marketing campaign:
Know yourself
Your voice plays an essential role in marketing yourself and many restaurant brands lose sight of this. Make sure you speak and act like a human being who is friends with these customers and address them as if they are one specific person and not a target market. However, be careful because phony talk becomes very obvious. If you feel that you are not able to convey your restaurant’s personality with your writing, you should get someone else who can do this. For this, the first place you can look at is your staff members as you can find a college-age responsible staff member who could spend a few hours in a week to write your content. It is important to make sure that the tone is consistent across all your marketing campaigns and not just in emails. Your website, social media and even off-line marketing messages should complement each other. By being consistent, you can develop the personality of your brand and attract and retain the customers that you want. If you fail to present a comprehensive image and message to your customers they will go away with a poor impression of your brand and this is one of the surest ways of losing customers.
Identify your overreaching goals
First analyse what you want from your email-marketing campaign apart from customer visits. This means that you need to convey the message properly if you want customers to come to your restaurant on any particular days, what menu items you want them to try and what you want them to feel when they are in your location. It is possible to create a demand and an expectation if you identify your goals in the beginning. For deciding these goals you need to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and ask the question – “What’s in it for me?”. There should be some overall goals for email marketing and there have to be individual goals for each email. Be very specific about what you wish to achieve on the whole and think how each email can drive traffic at specific times. Such a focused email marketing campaign will be much more effective than simply trying to bombard the recipients with some kind of vague messages even if they are positive ones.
Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes
When you combine points 1 and 2 then it becomes clear that you need to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. What information do you want to give to your customers and why should they choose you? Is it that you are an eclectic fine dining restaurant which is full on Fridays and Saturdays, but there is no traffic for the rest of the week? You need to address this issue and then think about what extra you can give to the customer in order to entice him or her to visit you on weekdays. An average individual receives about 120 emails per day and you need to cut through the clutter. You can do this by speaking the language of your target ideal customers and by acknowledging their situation.
Look for some hot topic in the news that you can ride on. You can also throw in a little sarcasm or acknowledge the fact that your email may be at priority number 118 among the 120 that they have received. The idea is to put yourself in the shoes of a person who is reviewing four to five unread emails and you need to stand out among them.
Use fresh subject lines
The run-of-the-mill statements will simply not cut in. Others are too bland or cute and will probably get lost in a sea of emails to be read. If there is no personality to any of them – you could interchange the brands and no one will know. This is often the problem with most of the emails that we normally receive. If you want to understand what this means you should try to read some of the emails that you receive on a daily basis. You will find that most of them use the same kind of language and clichéd statements which don’t make a desired impact on the reader.
Focus on one primary call to action
If you over emphasise a link, it may manage to distract people and take a look at it, but it doesn’t represent a call to action. There are usually a large number of calls to action in some big-brand emails and it will be a good idea to try and emulate these. Another thing to avoid is the temptation to be all things to all people with every email. Don’t add all the offers in one email and save it for next week’s email. This will prevent the recipient from feeling overwhelmed and confused.
Don’t feed the urge to keep offering
Every single email need not include a call to action and in fact if you are trying to build a brand and make people love that brand, you will be making a mistake if you keep pounding them with offers. Of course you can’t do this in every email either but out of 52 emails in a year you should definitely dedicate a few to brand building. There is no point in giving lucrative offers to the target customers if you cannot bring them about to trusting you as a brand and feeling that they will be getting value for their money with you.
Don’t call it a VIP club if it is not one
Keep in mind that a VIP status should be dependent on behaviour instead of on submitting a name in an email list. Many companies make the mistake of naming every offer as a VIP offer, and hence lose their value as a brand as they come across as being desperate. If the email provider’s default footer makes references to a VIP rewards program then change that text. Anybody can see through this and understand that it is not really a VIP program at all. A customer will be happy to be called a VIP if he or she has earned it through their purchase history. If, on the other hand, you use these types of phrases randomly then a customer will be encouraged to ignore other aspects of the marketing as insincere.
Send emails every month or every week, but not more often
Make sure that you don’t bombard your customers will emails. Too many emails with repeated messages will only encourage the recipient to unsubscribe from your list.
Your emails should be mobile friendly
If you look at the statistics, more than 50% of emails are being opened on mobile devices, and this is why you need to make your emails mobile friendly. Either use the email provider’s mobile templates or pressurise them to create mobile templates or create your own. If you fail to do this, you will definitely lose out on a large number of people who actually need the convenience of being able to read your emails on the go.
Don’t ever include QR codes in your emails
Although QR codes do serve a purpose, there is no reason why they should be added to an email. If a customer is reading the email using a mobile device, they may not have the ability or reason to scan them. This will simply result in the recipient getting an incomplete message and they are not likely to respond favourably to that.
Another thing that you need to keep in mind is that you can keep doing what you are doing, but if you really want to stand out then you need to use a combination of things. Your message has to make its way through a lot of stuff to drive engagement with your brand. As mentioned above, the first requisite is that your message should stand out among the crowd of emails in an inbox. Then again, you need to create a need and want in the customer’s mind along with implanting a positive message. This is the reason that email marketing is more than just drafting emails with flowery language.
Let us look at some quick email marketing guide for restaurants and pubs
Get started – build your list
- Keep a fishbowl which clearly indicates to the people that they will receive emails. For this purpose the fishbowl should be kept at the entrance where they can fill out forms or keep their signed business cards to indicate that they want to sign up on your list. It will be even better to keep a tablet where people can sign up online.
- Place a link to the sign-up form on your receipt.
- Consider a VIP list for the regular customers because you know their names and they know yours. It will make them feel that they are visiting friends rather than coming to your restaurant for a quick meal. They should be the first ones to know what is happening.
- Make sure to mention your newsletter to your customers.
- Offer an incentive like a discount, a special birthday shot or a free coffee if they sign up or forward the email to a friend.
What you should share
- The menu – especially the weekly or daily specials
- Great combos that you love and offer on your menu
- Any special dishes you may have created for calorie conscious people or with special care to avoid allergens
- Special events
- Reservation reminders
- Special ingredients you love
- Recipes that you are willing to share
- Season’s greetings.
Never forget to
- Have your address in the email with compliance to anti-spam legislation
- Provide your telephone number
- Showcase your opening hours
- Give them a method with which they can reserve
- Use the name of a person and the name of your restaurant in the ‘from’ line of your email
- Use an email which is being monitored by a human
- If people have signed up with the fishbowl then send them a welcome email.
Do it in style
- If you are unable to get professional photos of your dishes, make it a point to ask a friend who is good at photography to take some pictures. Make sure to plate up beautify, snap a couple of shots, and keep them handy
- Include a good picture of the restaurant, either full or empty, since it will help people imagine the restaurant.
If you keep all these tips in mind, you will be able to create an innovative email-marketing campaign that will be a sure hit with your target customers. This will in turn ensure that your restaurant becomes more successful than it already is and you will be able to be your customer’s preferred choice.