Are You Looking for Ways to Market your Restaurant?
If you have tried avenues like online advertising or even offline flyer distribution, they can either be too expensive or too time-consuming. Such techniques may not be effective due to advertising fatigue and also, no customer’s data are captured during these process which result in wastage of marketing cost and effort. Restaurant needs repeated customers for it to grow profitably so customers’ data need to be properly captured for future restaurant marketing and promotion.
However, there are many restaurants still not using email marketing as one of their restaurant marketing strategies so they miss out a lot of opportunities including building a strong customer database early. In this post, we have compiled a list of email marketing benefits so you can understand why you have to invest in email marketing early to gain competitive advantage.
List Building (Lead Generation) Tool
Email marketing is a great list building tool if you do it correctly, it helps to generate leads and furthermore, it is an excellent tool to nurture lead into customers for your restaurant by setting up a email drip campaign. The best way to start building a mailing list is from your restaurant website. By installing a subscription form, you can capture visitors’ names and email address for future marketing. To entice website visitors to sign up for your subscription form, you need to offer some attractive goodies such as “Free Birthday Treat for You” or “$10 Off for Lunch or Dinner”. Once they are in your mailing list, you will have full control of what to promote to them in future.
Engage & Connect Your Customers
Restaurants who are more proactive in attracting customers back to their restaurant will be rewarded as their customers will reciprocate by bringing more friends and family to them.
Customers want to be connected and engaged frequently so email marketing is considered as an ideal communication tool for informing them about upcoming events, new products and latest menu promotion.
There are no other tools that could offer personalised information like email marketing especially when you have collected enough details about your customers such as their location. If, for example, you want to fill up your restaurant seats quickly during dinner time, you can send out an email immediately telling your customers the number of seats available for booking. This is extremely effective if you know customers who live or work around your area. This is possible if you have collect your customer data and segment them properly. You can inform your customers using Facebook though but it does not allow you to do personalization like email marketing.
Marketing Automation
Restaurant marketers are busy people especially if you are also the owner of the restaurant. When time is the rare commodity, you need to leverage on automated technology to save your time and energy. Email marketing automates the process of email subscription and un-subscription, mailing list updating, auto scheduling of birthday greeting sending and birthday offer. All these tasks can be set once and run automatically behind the scene without the need for constant human intervention.
If you have been manually adding customers’ details to your spreadsheet and sending out promotional emails, you would appreciate this automation process as email marketing eliminates the painful process and simplifies your marketing job.
Segmentation
In the past, most restaurant marketers just blasted out the same email message to every single customers in their mailing list regardless of their profiles and preferences. However, with the improvement of today’s email marketing technology, you can now segment your customers based on their demographic, behaviour or preference.
Doing so allows you to personalize your email promotion message and you could send targeted message to different group of customers with better response.
A/B Testing
In addition, email marketing allows you to test out different elements of your email message such as the subject line, visual, content and offers to different segment of customers. This give you better insights of what is working and not working so you can scale up your email marketing effort based on the secret formula you have discovered.
3-in-1 Email Marketing Tool
If you have been doing restaurant marketing and on tight resources, you may rely on a few software to complete your tasks. For example, you could be using Microsoft Outlook for emailing; survey tool to find out the feedback from customers; excel sheet for maintaining customers’ database and Google form for online registration for restaurant events. There is a good news now that some email marketing providers, for example Constant Contact provides affordable 3-in-1 marketing tool that you can complete all these tasks without the hassles to switch from one software to another. Its marketing tool includes the following:
- Email Marketing
- Survey
- Online Registration
- Event Invitation
The above marketing tools are a perfect bundle if your restaurant organizing a lot of events. For example, if your restaurant organizes wine tasting or new menu tasting session regularly. You could use this set of marketing tools from Constant Contact to send out email invitation directly to your customers and get them to confirm their seats early. There are email invitation templates available so you can pick one and attach a map with event details without the need to create from scratch.
Customers who are interested for the event are directed to registration page to sign up immediately. It also has an option where your customers can pay online to confirm the seats. After the event, you could email to the same participants for their feedback and suggestion. You will be happy to know that all these processes can be set up easily and the laborious process of importing and exporting data will be a history.
Insights
As the saying goes, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” You need metrics to see how the performance of your email marketing campaign so you can continually tweaking it till success. The email marketing tool will make your life easy as it provides immediate online email marketing report every time after you send out an email marketing campaign. This gives you an insight of the performance of your email campaign and what improvement can be made in future.
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As you can see from the above, email marketing is one of the indispensable marketing tools you need to consider to market and grow your restaurant business. If you have not tried email marketing, try it today and you will be amazed by its result! You can click on the link here to sign up a free trial.