How To Attract Customers To Restaurant: eNewsletter

If you are running a restaurant, you know your nature of business depend very much on repeat customers. However, there is no firm guarantee that your repeat customers will always remain loyal to you. There is always a need to retain repeat customers and at the same time, attract more new customers to your restaurant.

How do you do that?
So instead of waiting the customers to go to you, you can be more proactive by reaching out to them. One effective ways is to invest on an eNewsletter – an electronic newsletter where you can connect with your repeat customers as well as attract new customers. Basically the eNewsletter can help in many ways, such as the following:

1. To inform the customers what is the latest happenings in the restaurant as well as the latest menu promotion and special offer.
2. Email them mouth-watering menu to entice them to visit your restaurant more.
3. Offer incentive for their visits, for example, a free drinks or appetizers.
4. You can also reward your loyal customers by giving them exclusive membership rate and be the first to try out your restaurant new menu.
5. Inform your customers of special events like holding of wine-and-food tasting, invitation of celebrity chef, authors or entertainer to your restaurant.
6. Restaurant customers are eager to try out new menu so make sure they are the first to be informed and offer them early-bird specials.

The content of the eNewsletter must be compelling enough in order to be effective, you must craft your eNewsletter in such a way that your customers know there is value when they open your eNewsletter. So indirectly, the eNewsletter also help you to build up your brand. Once you established trust and rapport with your customers, it is easier to market to them in future.

Using Email Marketing to send out Your eNewsletter
In the age of instant gratification, everything has to be done in a flash. However, your eNewsletter cannot be sent out using your normal email client as your email clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Lotus, Gmail, Yahoo are not built to handle in sending bulk email addresses or messages. Using such email clients to send out eNewsletter will cause more problems than help. Moreover, there is no way to track your delivery of your eNewsletter.

The correct way of sending out a eNewsletter is using Email Marketing System because it can not only send out bulk email addresses but also able to track the performance of your eNewsletter. You can then be immediately informed how many customers have received and responded. The email marketing system can show you the statistics online which customers have received, open and clicked on it. In addition, it will show you which customers’ email addresses are invalid, who are on vacation or whether their mailboxes are full. The statistics helps you to take corrective action immediately by sending out another email for the new changes.

There are many email marketing systems around but there is one who specially caters to restaurant owners and it has been a pioneer in email marketing industry – Constant Contact. It is based in USA and started in 1998, since then it has helped many restaurant owners achieved success through email marketing. The beauty of Constant Contact’s monthly email marketing plan is it allows you to send unlimited times of eNewsletter or email messages to your customers. In other words, you can email promotional discount coupon to your customers not only monthly but weekly or even daily.

Also, to make life easier for busy restaurant owner like you, Constant Contact has made ready-made eNewsletter template such as the following to help you get started.

The cost for sending out eNewsletter is very affordable compared to traditional Newsletter. If you are interested to try out the eNewsletter template, you can sign up a free account with Constant Contact by clicking here. The free account allows you to try out the email marketing functionality for 60 days and allow you to send out to a maximum number of 100 customers unlimited times.

Give it a try today and see how it can to attract more customers to your restaurant.