Slow days are real as a restaurant owner. School’s just begun, meaning that families are out of vacation mode and are spending more time at home focusing on their children. If you’re wanting to ramp up business in the coming months rather than succumb to the slow-moving trend, then email marketing is one of the many things that you should incorporate into your restaurants approach. Here’s why.
Constant Reminder
One of the reasons that people stop visiting restaurants is because they’re out of sight, out of mind—until an event comes around. The best way to ensure that this doesn’t happen to your restaurant is by making sure that you are neither out of sight nor out of mind at any point in time.
Email marketing provides you with an easy way to do that without being overly invasive. Setting up an email marketing campaign to remind your past customers of your existence, on a consistent basis, is one of the best ways for you to make sure that you stay top of mind.
Now, how do you not only remind them about your restaurant but make it so that they want to come in? Well, we’ll get to that in a bit.
It’s Easy to Set Up
You’re only one point into the blog and you’re already worrying about how much extra time this is going to take. Well, the good news is — it’s easy! Email marketing doesn’t require a hefty background in design and it won’t take you years to set up. In fact, if you find an email marketing company that really understands how everything works, you’ll usually have templates that you can turn to and fill out as needed! How’s that for easy?
Aside from the actual creation of the email being pretty straightforward, the process of building a campaign isn’t too time-consuming either. The first step is figuring out what type of experience you’d like for your clients to have.
Start by deciding how often you’d like to be reaching your customers. Have an idea? The next step is to create a storyline of the emails that you’d like for them to receive and an order that you’d like for them to be sent out in — for as long as you’ve decided you’d like to be sending out emails. Hopefully, we didn’t lose you in that statement, but the point is to figure out a schedule and fill each slot with an email.
Now that you’ve got that figured out, it’s time to create the emails! This might be the most time-consuming part, especially if you’re starting from scratch. Overall, this could definitely take you some time to complete, but once you’ve got it done it’s as easy as inputting emails and letting them take their journey. From that point forward, you’re just going to be adding new templates and email designs as needed.
An Affordable Approach to Marketing
One of the main reasons that restaurants can find so much value in email marketing is that it’s affordable. During those slower, it’s especially important that you are making the most of your marketing. Now, we know that marketing doesn’t come at a small cost — it’s an investment, especially when done correctly.
Get the most bang for your buck by reaching clients that you know have enjoyed their experience at your restaurant through an affordable marketing tactic. Besides, it’s so much easier to convert customers that you already know have had a killer experience!
A Green Marketing Method
What’s better than your marketing being affordable? A marketing approach that is also green! Email marketing helps you conserve products that are used in popular marketing tactics like newspapers, coupons, magazines, and more. Save some paper and some money by offering all of the same information and bargains through email.
Target Your Marketing
Without a doubt, one of the most challenging parts of marketing is figuring out how you’re going to target the people that are most likely to come to your restaurant. Sure you could print out hundreds of coupons for “Family Night” and have someone drop them off door to door, but what percentage of those are going to wind up in the trash?
Rather than waste the money on the printing, send out an email blast that targets all consumers with a code to use in the restaurant. Once they’ve brought that code in or entered their email address to take advantage of it, move them to a specific email list that notes they are a family. Now, you know exactly who to be sending those family-friendly discounts to!
Get More Online Orders
Of course, it’s great to bring people into the store, but during these months, it’s not uncommon for people to want to order takeout and enjoy it on their back patio. Don’t let your consumers forget that you’ve got an easy-to-use, online ordering system that allows for them to enjoy the same delicious food in the comfort of their home. Give your customers the delicious food that they want, bring in some more business — it’s a win-win situation!
If your restaurant doesn’t currently have an online ordering software, make sure to check out a few of our online ordering software studies and ask our team for a free demo on how you can start to incorporate this into your day-to-day business.
Avoiding slumps is a challenging thing to do, but email marketing can keep your restaurant busy. We’ve listed a few of the ways that email marketing can help you, but in our next post we will touch on a few of the things that you can incorporate into your email marketing to help drive customers to the store — so keep an eye open for it!
Owning a restaurant is meant to be fun, but that doesn’t mean it has to be slow paced. Follow the Online Orders Now blog series for additional ways that you can keep from falling into a slump. As always, if you need any help with an online ordering software, we are the ones to turn to. Contact our team today with any questions you may have and we’d be happy to help.