A restaurant email marketing campaign can do much more than simply send out an email blast to existing customers with information about special offers and events. With the right approach, this type of campaign can help grow your restaurant’s name, attract new customers, and drive traffic to your website.
Let’s dive into how you can use email marketing to grow your restaurant and what tools you need to get started.
Create a Restaurant Email Marketing Strategy
The first step to creating an effective email marketing strategy is to sit down with your digital marketing strategist and come up with a plan. You need to consider what you’re trying to achieve and set some SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) goals. You can find plenty of advice online on how to create this sort of strategic plan, so take some time to research and plan before you begin executing.
Determine Your Target Audience
Your restaurant email marketing strategy will be much more effective if you determine your target audience and create content tailored to them. With a little bit of research, you can discover what kinds of content your audience likes so you can create content that will engage them. To learn more, I’d recommend taking a look at the analytics and insights that come with your Google Ads dashboard. This is a free tool that tracks your campaigns and shows you all the information you need to understand what is and isn’t working. From there, you can determine the kind of content your target audience is responding to and tailor your strategy accordingly.
Choose An Email Marketing Service Provider
Now, you don’t need to go overboard and sign up with every single email marketing service provider out there, but it’s important to do your research and choose a service that will be able to provide the most value. With so much competition, businesses are going above and beyond to stand out from the crowd and gain new customers. If you want to stand out, you’re going to need to do the same.
Make sure that you’re choosing a company that is reputable and offers a good customer experience. Also, make sure that you’re getting a decent deal because there are plenty of scammers out there who will try to trick you into signing up with their service without offering much value. As much as possible, you want to choose a company that will provide real value and help your restaurant grow.
Set Up Autoresponders For Each Person You Email
There is a lot more you can do with just a restaurant email marketing strategy than send out a few emails every month. You can take advantage of the automation feature that many email marketing service providers offer, which will ensure that you’re constantly keeping in touch with your audience and that you never miss out on a sale or opportunity. If you’re just getting started, you may want to consider using a free service like Aweber to get the basics down. You can tie your autoresponder to your restaurant’s email list, making it much easier to follow up with new customers and existing customers who haven’t heard from you in a while.
Build An Email List
Now that you have your strategy in place and your email list set up with autoresponders, it’s time to populate it with email addresses. I’d suggest using a tool like MailChimp to get started. With MailChimp, you can create email lists based on your target audience’s interests, hobbies, demographics, or location.
If you want to gain more customers and grow your restaurant, you’re going to need to get creative and come up with new ways to engage with your audience. One of the most effective and reliable sources of traffic and leads to my website is Cafemom – an online community for moms. Often times, when I think of moms, I think of women who are home with their children during the day and don’t have much free time. What better way to capture their attention than with an email that is tailored to their interests?
Experiment
Like with any new marketing initiative, it’s important to try new things and see what works and what doesn’t. One of the best things about email marketing is that it is very easy to experiment with – simply change the subject line or the greeting and see how the email fares. If you want to know which of your strategies work best, you can simply pick one and test it out. Once you’ve determined the effectiveness of a particular campaign, you can expand your strategy and apply what you learned to other campaigns. In the meantime, you can keep track of all your efforts in a single place with a dashcam platform like HubSpot or Marketo.
Measure The Success Of Your Strategy
Finally, it’s important to measure the success of your email marketing strategy. It can be difficult to determine exactly how much a particular campaign contributed to the growth of your restaurant, but you can use a tool like Google Analytics to get an idea of the effectiveness of your strategy. You can segment your traffic and examine the conversion rate – how many people who visited your website ended up becoming paying customers – as well as the unsubscribe rate – how many people who signed up for your email list decided to opt out. While it can be hard to quantify the exact impact of a single campaign, you can use the insights and data from your Google Analytics to determine the effectiveness of your strategy and make the right adjustments.
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