Email is considered the Holy Grail of marketing strategies for customer interaction. When done right, personalized emails encourage engagement by delivering information that is attentive to, and sometimes anticipates, the demands of the client. Benefits to the customer are equally advantageous to the restaurant.
Your email marketing campaigns can yield two drastically different results.
- It is regarded as spam and ignored.
- It can turn your leads into sales.
Email marketing can yield a return on investment of up to 4200 percent when executed correctly. That works out to $42 for every $1 invested in email marketing.
Every business should aim for the latter result, and we are here to tell you why and how.
With advancements in digital technology over the past decade, email marketing has become more relevant than ever to businesses. To successfully convey a message via email, marketers needed to figure out a means to get information to the end-user without being blocked by spam filters and software.
Developing a solid email marketing plan allows you to engage and interact with your target audience while increasing revenue at a low cost. Email marketing solutions, like other platforms and media, let your company reach clients more efficiently than ever before.
Email marketing allows marketers to see real-time consumer feedback and track how effective their campaign is at reaching market penetration, demonstrating a communication channel’s scope. This is also one of the more targetable advertising strategies, as it is easier to craft tailored emails to your consumer than television commercials that are shown to a mass audience.
Email Marketing For Restaurants
When it comes to keeping the connection between your brand and customers, email is an easy-to-use, cost-effective, and dependable marketing platform. It lets you stay in touch with existing customers and demonstrate your appreciation for their loyalty and business. You can also attract new consumers with attractive discounts, offers, and new additions to your menu.
Small to medium-sized firms are uniquely positioned to benefit the most from email marketing. In contrast, larger organizations may struggle to connect with smaller communities as they feel like these companies cannot relate with them.
Here are some of the benefits of adopting an email marketing strategy for your restaurant business.
1. Email Marketing is affordable, shareable and efficient
Restaurant businesses have learned to optimize their content for social media platforms. However, the organic reach of these businesses on these social platforms is dependent on their ever-changing algorithms. Meanwhile, paid reach is dependent on one’s budget and how much one is ready to spend for hosting and running online campaigns.
This is where email marketing comes to play with its incredible cost-effectiveness, affordability, and directly targeting the audience right in their inbox. When leads express interest and sign up to hear from a business via email, they consent to be contacted. With email marketing, you can maximize your marketing efforts by reaching the right audience at a fraction of the expense of paid advertising.
2. It is helpful in collecting valuable customer data
Customer data is critical to a company’s long-term viability, growth and expansion. When this data is collected, tracked, and improved, it aids restaurants in improving their performance, giving them a competitive advantage and allowing them to align products and services with consumer preferences.
Personalizing your email marketing is the most effective approach to engaging with your audience, and personalization necessitates learning a little about your target audience.
That is why data collection is crucial. Your data offer details about your target audience, which you may utilize to market as consumers. The more information you have, the better you will communicate.
3. It establishes brand awareness
Building great relationships with an email list are one of the most effective marketing tactics for growing sales and enhancing a company’s position.
When used correctly, email marketing may increase customer loyalty by forging direct connections with customers, growing the ROI of any marketing campaign, and reducing unsubscribe rates from email lists.
According to the Digital Marketing Association, 66% of buyers purchase after receiving an email marketing communication.
Email is over 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in acquiring new clients. Email marketing has a $38 average return on investment compared to other marketing methods. It stands at 122%, four times more than any other digital marketing medium.
4. It builds stronger customer relationships
Restaurants may foster a better connection with consumers by recording vital client information such as contact details, personal information, order preferences, and history, which promotes sales and helps a restaurant expand. In addition, restaurants might send out gift coupons, promote tailored specials, or offer a complimentary meal on a customer’s birthday or anniversary, for example, to improve the visitor experience.
Email marketers may urge readers to take the next step in their buyer’s journey by writing a well-written email that finishes with a clear call-to-action, bringing them closer to conversion.
If subscribers have previously purchased something from you, they are more likely to respond to your emails and convert again. However, if they have not bought anything yet, personalized emails with incentives might help bring in their first sale.
5. It is useful for segmenting and personalizing messages
People want to be treated as unique individuals, which is why personalization is critical in marketing. But how can you achieve that when you’re marketing to hundreds of people?
Organizing your email subscribers into several categories can help you increase your revenue. For example, segmented campaigns resulted in a 760% boost in income for marketers in 2019.
- In the inbox, personalized emails are highly relevant, tailor-made content.
- Emails that are personalized are more likely to be opened and clicked on.
- By sending the right content to the right people at the right time, personalized emails improve customer experiences.
Grouping contacts by region, gender, age, job title, or purchasing history allows you to deliver more relevant emails to your subscribers’ interests. As a result, subscribers are more likely to open, click-through, and convert on your emails.
6. It is a great tool to offer discounts and incentives
Seasonality, weather, food trends, and a myriad other things contribute to restaurants experiencing dull periods. As a result, businesses frequently implement exclusive discounts, special offers, and specialized marketing efforts to overcome these lulls and improve foot traffic and sales.
On the other hand, customers are unlikely to visit your restaurant if they are unaware of the deals. That’s where email comes in as a valuable tool for communicating with your target audience. Email campaigns may be sent at any moment, so if you can predict when you want to send your promotion, you can reach out to your audience quickly, even in real-time.
The Best Email Marketing Habits
1. Grow Your Subscribers List
Suppose you’re going to execute restaurant email marketing. In that case, you’ll need to think about how you can keep generating leads so you can grow your email list.
Finding subscribers for your restaurant email marketing campaign is one of the initial stages of email marketing campaigns. These subscribers could be any one of the following:
- Website Visitors (via search engines) – Make sure your sign-up form is visible on your homepage, menu page, and reservation page of your website. The CTA to sign up should be visible at all times.
- Restaurant Guests – You can ask the guests at your restaurant to fill out a feedback form along with their receipt. If the service was satisfactory and they enjoyed the food, they are bound to leave a positive feedback along with voluntarily giving you their personal details to be contacted in the future.
Be sure to ask them for a birthday or anniversary date to reward them with enticing discounts in exchange for signing up!
- Delivery and Online Order Customers – When customers place an order online, they usually have to key in their email address, home address and phone number. They can automatically get added to your email list or you can offer an exclusive discount at checkout if they sign up.
2. Do A Test Run With A/B Testing
By testing your content and determining which types of messaging and offerings work best for each target, you can increase open rates and conversions. By A/B testing subject lines, content, emojis, picture size, image type, CTAs, you’ll learn a lot about what your audience is interested in. The possibilities for an A/B split are infinite.
Here is a representation of how A/B testing for email marketing works.
When A/B testing, subject lines, length of your content, word order, content, and incentive should be varied accordingly to see what will yield the best results from the rest of your email list.
3. Offer, Offer, Offer!
Here’s the bottomline: People love offers, discounts, and rewards.
Offering subscribers exclusive deals not available anywhere else is the best strategy to develop your email list and encourage subscribers to open your emails. To increase your open rate further, state your promotion in your subject line while offering a discount. It keeps your customers hooked, reduces unsubscribe rates, and encourages them to share your content with friends and family.
4. Keep It Visual
Did you know that “visual hunger” and “digital satiation” are a thing?
Food is as much a visual experience as it is a tasteful one. That said, your email cannot be bland when you are trying to promote something within your restaurant.
In other words, captivating visuals of delectably depicted, delicious food are adequate to provoke hunger and drive your audience to fulfill them. Your mind and body can feel as though you have enjoyed the dinner that you have only seen in visual form without the actual existence of physical food. Imagine the effects of images paired with real, delicious food if merely looking at an image of food can have this effect!
5. The Final Step: Designing Your Email
It can be tricky to create your first engaging, creative, fun-yet-functional email marketing campaign.
The most crucial thing is to know what you want them to do after your customers have read your email. For example, do you want them to come to your restaurant, give comments, leave a review, and so forth? Or do you want them to share your content on their social media accounts, increasing visibility and creating brand awareness?
Knowing what you want to achieve will help you plan your email campaign.
Here are a few excellent examples of classic, restaurant-based email marketing ideas. Each campaign was designed to achieve a specific purpose, and it is visible from their designs and their CTA.
- The Welcome Email
Welcome emails with attractive offers entice guests to visit your business. In addition, welcome emails are a great way to get your customers to sign up to your email list.
By using the subject line “Welcome To The Inner Circle,” you can make guests feel like they are part of an exclusive group, which would get them exclusive benefits.
Besides greeting the customer, you could offer a welcome offer to encourage repeat sales.
- Limited Time Menu Offers
Fall is synonymous with Pumpkin Spice everything – lattes, cappuccinos, cakes – you name it. Such food trends are ideal to cash on and create brand awareness among your audience for offering trendy, seasonal delicacies.
Here, the subject line is clear – Pumpkin Spice is Back. The email also has a clear CTA in red, asking customers to ‘Try One Today.’
Simple, straightforward, and effective.
- New Menu Offerings
Vegetarians and vegans, rejoice! Tim Hortons has rolled out their line of meatless offerings that is bound to help them capture a whole new market. While traditionally fast-food chains are known to serve delicious burgers and fried chicken, Tim’s Hortons’ vegan menu will certainly grab the attention of the public for this new venture.
However, this new addition to the menu would go to waste if people were not made aware of it. This email campaign has the subject line “100% Plant-Based Sausage” which would immediately pique the attention of anyone and make them go “Sausage and plants?”.
This curiosity creates a higher open rate for your marketing emails, and may effectively convert leads into sales.
- Birthday Emails
What better way to treat your customer on their birthday than a nice slice of cake?
Sending out personalized birthday emails is an excellent method to increase client loyalty while also rewarding individuals who take the time to read your newsletters.
Birthday emails are the most effective approach to commemorate this special occasion for your customers. Birthday emails are also one of the most successful kinds of emails you can send. They are 481% more likely to be opened than advertising ones and birthday emails produce 342% more revenue than other marketing emails.
It’s safe to say that Omaha Steaks has captured the essence of birthday emails, with a birthday greeting, an irresistible chocolate cake, and a CTA button that makes it easier for the customer to claim their gift.
- Holiday Sales
During the Holiday season, people are in the mood to spend, which is the perfect time for restaurants to take full advantage of the Holiday Spirit!
Your loyal customers will be impressed if you provide them with a limited-time holiday menu or a discount for the holiday season. Remind them of their worth by sending them exclusive offers only available to them via email marketing. This is enough to persuade them to come in and take advantage of your unique offerings.
Adding a sense of urgency to your holiday email campaign will help you sell more. Urgency promotes a deadline, which encourages your audience to act now rather than later, resulting in more impulse purchase.
- The Nudge Email
If you’ve tried alternative subject lines, sent your emails at different times, changed up your content and your subscribers still aren’t engaging, it’s time to begin some re-engagement email campaigns.
According to Marketing Sherpa, marketers lose 25% of their email list each year on average. As a result, list retention should be a top priority for each email marketer.
Your customers willingly gave you their email address because they liked what you offered. Therefore, restaurants have a high possibility of regaining engagement and trust by reminding customers of their worth by providing relevant and valuable content.
- The Thank You Email
Gratitude is a beautiful quality to have, especially in the business world. Sending a suitable ‘thank you’ email to your subscribers is one of the simplest methods to show your appreciation and gratitude towards a cause, a group of people, and more. This boosts client interaction and heightens brand awareness, which leads to increased brand loyalty.
At QDOBA Mexican Eats, their message is pretty clear from the get-go. “We Appreciate You” is their email tagline for offering a 50% discount to Veterans and Active Duty Military officers on Veterans Day.
Receiving such an email makes the brand feel closer to the customer, thereby boosting morale for the restaurant’s gratitude and thereby increasing business.
- Seasonal Items Email
As a restaurant owner, if you are relaunching a signature seasonal item, it is imperative that you let your customers know about it.
Part of the attractiveness of seasonal products is that they are only accessible for a limited time. Therefore, customers will want to take advantage of the offer. At the same time, it is still available because it is only accessible for a limited time.
By posting on social media or putting up signage in your restaurants, let customers know what you’ll be offering for each season and make them enthusiastic about it.
- Personalized Promotions
A personalized offer or discount on your customer’s favorite item delivers additional benefits to restaurants, in addition to increased guest satisfaction. Information about a guest’s tastes and order history helps restaurants build a personal relationship with their guests and provide more efficient service. In addition, personalization is a beautiful way to generate upsells, which leads to bigger check sizes and more tips, positively benefiting operational efforts.
Like loyalty programs, personalized emails enable diners to identify themselves at the restaurant, allowing restaurateurs to acquire actionable data to direct their operations and marketing activities.
- Website Visitors Retargeting
Retargeting website visitors gives restaurants the insight and opportunity to convert leads and sales.
By analyzing data such as ‘What time of the day do I have the most traffic on my website?”restaurants can use this information to target their customers. For example, if most of the traffic is around lunch time, restaurants can promote lunch offers to their customers.
- Feedback Email
People are increasingly looking online to make restaurant decisions. Many customers learn about new restaurants through social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Yelp Reviews.
Allow your customers to write about you on social media and other internet channels with an email prompt. Asking for feedback proves that restaurants are looking for constructive criticism to improve their service. In addition, a positive and healthy feedback history (accessible online) can help your business establish a strong internet presence.
- Special Event Invitation Email
Inviting your guests to a special event makes them feel special, appreciated, and valued.
Email invites are highly cost-effective compared to print or paper invites. In addition, you may make your information more relevant and meaningful to your guests in a variety of ways by issuing email invites.
You can, for example, include clickable links in the content of your invitations. Suppose your audience is not entirely familiar with your company. In that case, the hyperlinks on the email will direct them to your website and give them information regarding the event. You can also include maps and directions to the event’s place, making it easier to locate the event
An Asset to your Restaurant Marketing Strategy
Email marketing has massive potential because it is one of the most cost-effective digital marketing methods available to businesses. It can assist in attracting new consumers, demonstrating your continuous appreciation for existing customers, and encouraging them to return for the second time, third time, and more!
When it comes to marketing your restaurant, it’s important for restaurant owners to be present where their customers are. Email is the one of the most efficient marketing mediums available to every restaurant today.
If you have not started sending emails to your customers, now might be the best time for your restaurant to start prioritizing email marketing.