Slow days at the restaurant? Not filling your dining room to capacity during the week? You can drive more foot traffic while building stronger relationships with your customers by using email marketing campaigns.
With 4.26 billion email users across the globe, email is an integral part of daily life; and email marketing has proven to be an effective strategy for restaurants of all types and sizes. Not only does marketing to restaurant guests through email increase brand awareness, but it also encourages return visits, drives traffic to your website, influences behavior, and generates more reservations.
How to Use Email Marketing
If you’re wondering what type of content you should feature in your restaurant’s emails, there are multiple topics you can communicate to help drive incremental traffic, including:
- Your Menu: Let customers know about weekly specials and seasonal dishes.
- Promotions: Share limited-time deal, contests, or discounts pertaining to gift cards, sporting events, and happy hour.
- Restaurant Updates: Tell guests about yourself and your brand. Highlight a team member. Talk about a cause your restaurant supports.
- Feedback: Invite customers to share feedback and leave a review about their experience with your restaurant.
- Holidays and Events: Capitalize on New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and any other calendar event or special occasion.
- Birthdays & Anniversaries: Send well wishes and an exclusive offer that customer can use when they celebrate their special day at your restaurant.
- Newsletter: Outline all your offerings for the week or month, including entertainment, drink specials, and holiday hours.
Tips for Getting Started
A marketing email campaign is easy to execute with the right tools. It’s important to have the ability to fully brand email communications as well as segment and filter your customer list. Generic emails are proven to be less effective, so you want to send personalized messages and offers that target a specific list of customers. Sending a relevant and well-timed email is the key to increase conversions. With email automation and reporting features, your restaurant has the power to schedule and deliver drip campaigns at just the right time and view comprehensive result reports.
While this list of features and capabilities may sound like a tall order, the Libro Guest Experience Platform combines Guest Marketing along with Reputation Management, Reservations, and Table Management into a single, easy-to-use platform.
The Benefits of Email Marketing
Restauranteurs are finding quick success by managing all their guest relations directly in the Libro Guest Experience Platform. Tandem, a fine-dining restaurant and wine bar, saw an uptick in reservations using the Libro Guest Marketing module. They filled 35% of their dining room capacity after sending weekly newsletters to customers. Birdhouse Wingerie & Bar also credits the Libro module for tripling their sales on a slow weeknight after emailing special offers and promotional events to a targeted list of customers.
If taking your restaurant’s email marketing strategy to the next level to drive more foot traffic, increase brand awareness, and offset notoriously slow weekdays, contact Libro here.