Why Email Marketing Is Good For Restaurants
Estimated to be about 15% of the total marketing budget across the industry, email marketing is among the easiest marketing strategies to deploy.
Find out the eight other benefits of using email marketing for your restaurant below.
- Meet Demand: Statistics show over 72% of Americans want to receive emails from businesses.
- Low Costs: On top of being almost-free and affordable, email marketing wastes no money on print and postage.
- Automation: Automated emails record 119% more click rates than broadcast emails.
- Better ROI: Generating 28.5% in ROI when compared to direct email, marketers can earn up to $44 for every $1 spent on email marketing.
- Advanced Tools: From in-depth reporting to comprehensive analytics, you can track the opening rate, conversion rate, and other metrics to keep improving your campaigns.
- Brand Exposure: You can increase awareness about your brand among subscribers by personalizing the email with your brand logo and other details.
- Improved Sales: Include upsell and cross-sell options in your email marketing strategies to encourage your customers to buy from your restaurant.
- Convert Lost Customers: You can recover customers who abandoned their carts via follow up emails based on their behavior using a software.
How Do I Pick The Right Software For Restaurants?
Restaurateurs and marketers searching for professional tips on email marketing software will find the list below worth bookmarking.
Look for the following key performance indicators for identifying seamless marketing software.
- Contact Management: Tracking and record keeping of communication between the subscriber and the business is an important feature.
- Segmentations Available: Check the list of segmentations such as age, spending history, geographic location, behavior, and gender on your target audience.
- Customization & Branding: Assess personalization tools offered by the service provider for your design ideas.
- Integrations: Keep an eye out for integrations such as API, CRM, Google Analytics, Social Media and Plugins.
- Automation Tools: Look out for behavioral triggers to create smart automation sequences.
- List Maintenance: Watch for advanced maintenance tools such as the removal of soft bounces or hard bounces.
Email Marketing Campaign Ideas For Restaurants
Launching a new campaign isn’t child’s play. That’s why it’s good to check out examples of restaurant email campaigns first to see what works and what doesn’t before you take the plunge on your own.
- Complimentary Dishes: Send promotional messages to customers notifying them about free dishes with entrees, main courses, or appetizers so that they proactively shop at your restaurant
- Seasonal Menu Changes: If your menu items are in for a change this season, share the news with your loyal customers so they can book their reservations in advance. The same is applicable when you’re adding new cuisines or bringing in new staples to the menu
- Customer Retention: Given repeat customers spend up to 67% more than new customers, pitching promotional offers with purchase is the best way of bringing existing contacts back to your restaurant
- Show brand values: Another brilliant way to draw in loyal customers is by sharing the story behind your restaurant, chefs, or how your dishes came to fruition. You can even add a video story or picture to increase the impact of the message
- Special Event Dishes: Whether it’s the birthday or anniversary date of your customer, treat them with a special discount, freebie, or a similar offer that’s captivating
- Survey Email: Marketers can collect more details about customers as well as their tastes and distastes via survey-type marketing emails
- Add a GIF: You can also use videos and GIFs to improve the engagement of the reader. This strategy works because GIFs deliver a 130% increase in conversions
Best Practices
If you want to make the most of email marketing, the first step is to use a software designed for your goals. Next, research and stick to a consistent rhythm of sending your emails such as every Tuesday or Thursday. This is because automated emails have 60% more conversion than emails sent at random intervals.
Find out the best three email marketing strategies for restaurant owners below to get started.
Follow The Standards
Given welcome emails produce 320% more sales than promotional emails, create and set a welcome email. Another norm is to include dishes from your menu using captivating descriptions because this can drive up purchase intent by 27%.
Make Use Of Automation
Create triggers that prompt email sequences such as birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays. You can also send a series of automated emails based on the variable data such as the subscriber behavior of abandoning the cart.
Customize Your Subject Lines
According to Econsultancy, adding emojis in the subject line can increase the open rate by 65%. Consider doing A/B testing with your subject lines to find out what rings well with your target audience.
Go For Email List Segmentation
With segmented campaigns leading to a 760% increase in revenue, it’s a vital tool for successful email marketing today. Segmentation refers to sending emails to parts of your contact list than pitching to all of them at once.
You need to start by dividing your customers into different segments based on their food preferences, cuisine type, location, ages, industry, income level, gender, purchase history, and other relevant parameters. For example, people who regularly order steak should get more steak offers than salads and other vegan options.
Be Mobile Friendly
Because 46% of email users open their messages via mobile, your emails must automatically scale to today’s mobile devices’ varied screen sizes and formats. That’s because emails that look odd or show up poorly are typically deleted in less than three seconds by users these days.
In short, the colors, font styles, font sizes, and other modifications on your email must adapt to the devices used by your target audience so that readability remains intact across the board.
Work On Customer Retention
With 60% of US customers finding advertisements untrustworthy, email is the next best medium to reach customers directly, especially those who’ve had food from your restaurant already. Up to 80% of businesses today rely on customer retention via email marketing, according to the Emarsys whitepaper survey.
You can send messages about new dishes, cuisines, or updates to your restaurant. According to Gourmet Marketing eBook, 70% of restaurant customers expect brands to send them coupons as they’re ready to use them.
Integrate Your Campaigns With Social Media
Another way of keeping your contacts hooked to the brand is by combining social media with email marketing. It creates a well-rounded marketing strategy because over 80% of internet users have social media accounts, and nearly-100% have email accounts.
Marketers can begin by sharing links to social media profiles of your brand within marketing emails. You can also encourage email users to connect with you on these channels, especially when conducting social media events.
Bottom Line
Email marketing can help increase customer loyalty, generate higher sales, and improve brand awareness for participating restaurants. Given its affordable price point and high ROI, small and large restaurants alike should consider the value of adding email marketing to their available advertising arsenal.
One last bonus tip is to select a day of the week and brand it yours with hashtags such as #FriedChickenFridays or #SpicySaturdays.