How can Restaurants Grow Their Customers using Email Marketing? (Part I)

As a restaurant owner, do you capture your customers’ information such as their names, telephone and email addresses?

It is not surprising that some restaurants operate for many years without knowing anything about their customers, let alone capturing any of their information.

It is important to capture your customers’ information if you want repeat customers for your restaurant. The reason is if you already have your customers’ email addresses, you can entice them to come back to your restaurant with coupons or special set meal promotion without expensive advertising.

An effective way of achieving this goal is using Email Marketing. It allows you to broadcast the coupons or promotion to many customers at one time and help you to track how your customers response.

You can see from the email marketing report whether they have opened or even clicked on your email. However, before you can enjoy such benefits, you need to have your customers’ email addresses.

Steps to Capture Online Customers’ Information

So in this post, we are going to see how we can capture customers’ email addresses by implementing an email optin form or sign up form to your website.

In this example, we are going to use the email optin form from Constant Contact who is one of the leading email marketing service providers in the industry. You can create a free account with Constant Contact and test drive it for 60 days.

Once you are logged into the Constant Contact account, you can follow the below steps to implement an email optin form on your website.

1. 1. At the dashboard, click on the “Sign-Up Forms” Tab at the top panel.
      
   2. Click on the + sign to create a new sign-up form.
   3. There are three options of email sign up form given, you can select any one you like. In this example, we select option number two.
      
   4. You can now edit the sign up form.
   5. Click on the “Content Tab” to change the title, description, background or button color.
   6. Unfortunately, there is no way to change the font or font size.
   7. By default, there is only one field – email in the pop-up form.
   8. If you want to add another field, click on “Contact Field” and check on “First Name” and swipe the “Required” button to on stage as you want visitors to enter their name compulsory.
      
   9. Now you have the basic sign up form but before adding it to your website, you can also control how the sign up form to be displayed.
   10. On the left panel, click on the “Settings” and “Timing“. Select the timing for the form to be displayed while visitors visit your website.
   11. Alternatively, you have the option of “exit on intent” to display the sign up form when visitor is about to exit the page. This is the last chance to capture your visitors as they might not come back to your website again.
   12. Once done, click on “Publish” button to activate the sign up form, it will then ask you to select a correct mailing list (if you have more than one) before publishing otherwise it will go to the wrong mailing list.
   13. Now you can add the pop-up form to your website so you need to copy its universal code. You can find the universal code at the top right corner of the sign up form homepage.
   14. Click on it will bring up a popup code as below:
       
   15. Copy the code and add it before the </body> tag of your web page then test and view it in the browser. If you need more details, you can see the detailed steps to install the code here.
   16. If you install the code correctly, you can now see your sign-up form on your web page as below.
   17. Note that if you have set your pop-up form upon exit, it will only appear when you are about to leave the page.

Once you have the sign-up form on your web page, visitors who visit your website and sign up will be automatically added to the database. This will reduce a lot of manual works and you will soon have a good collection of customers email address.

So start sending your customers your latest restaurant promotion, updates and new menu. Through constant email marketing and communication, it will help you to know your customers well so you can offer better food and services to them. Consequently, this will lead to better return on investment for your restaurant in long term.

#####

In the next post, we will talk about the different ways of attracting your visitors to sign up your form so stay tune and check back for more.