Email Marketing For Restaurants

by

RBurko

Email marketing is quite clearly the best marketing technique for restaurants of all types. Whether your restaurant is fast-food, fine-dining or anything in the middle, you can profit greatly from email marketing’s minimal pricing structure and highly effective targeting.

Announcing a new special menu selection? Need to get the word out about seasonal menu changes? Want to notify people about new hours, send out preferred customer coupons, or just bring people into your restaurant? Email marketing will create a line of communication with your customers so you can achieve these goals.

The restaurant industry competition is ferocious (not really earth shattering news!). Therefore breaking through the clutter of marketing messages to get your voice heard is quite challenging. Email marketing changes that for you because you can directly contact each customer. You have the choice to personalize the email to say “Hello Linda” (Doug, or Sally) automatically. This creates a relationship with your customers and maintains that your name/brand is in their mind. However before you get started, you’ll need to generate a list of customer to email to.

Build Your Mailing List > It All Starts Here!

The skeleton of your email marketing strategy is your mailing list. It is so of the utmost importance to have a high quality mailing list that is continuously growing. There is no ‘quick-fix’ to building a large contact database, and it especially won’t be done overnight. No need to worry with the restaurant industry, as it is the perfect setting to capture new emails, so you can expect pretty rapid growth.

Here are several well known steps that restaurant operators use to grow their email marketing mailing list:

– Place a “Signup Form” at the cash register so as people pay they will fill out their name and email address to be added to your email contact list. This tactic is made more effective if the cashier is instructed to prompt customers to sign up while processing payment.

– Have comment cards on each table. In addition to gathering feedback about your customers’ dining experiences, request their email address.

– You can also have your servers get the customer’s email addresses when delivering the check. You can even add extra motivation for your serving staff if there is some incentive for the server who collects the most email addresses.

– Provide a contest and have customers write their email address on the ticket/ballot. The prize can be a free desert, free meal, or any other prize that you think will entice people to enter.

Any one of these methods will work for you, the only thing you have to do is to communicate to the customer that they will receive occasional emails from you. You definitely don’t want to send emails to your customers if they don’t want them. That’s considered spam, and that is absolutely something you do not want to do. Not only is it no legal, it will also alienate your customers.

Your List is Built, It’s Time to Start Sending Emails > Be Imaginative!

Once you have a high quality mailing list, you have to get some good use out of it. There are so many of different ways that restaurants can use email marketing and with a little creative thinking you can definitely generate new ingenious ways to reach your customers.

A great initial step is to determine what your ultimate goal is. Do you want to drive people into your restaurant for breakfast, lunch, or dinner? Do you want more people to call to make reservations? Are you trying to increase your delivery or take-out business? I could go on. But, once you know what your goal is, you can send out emails that will help achieve that objective.

There are plenty of things that you can do with email marketing. The possibilities are endless. Keep in mind that with a little bit of testing, you can figure out what works the best for your restaurant, which contests promotions, etc will get you the desired results.

Robert Burko is President of Elite Email, the trusted

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service provider used by restaurants around the globe. Start harnessing the power of email marketing solutions for your organization with a no risk trial. Get more valuable tips for your restaurant by reading

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