Email Marketing for Restaurants: A Complete Guide

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. Email marketing is an excellent way to reach your customers with low cost, so that most of the restaurants now focusing on email marketing. With the growing use smartphones, nowadays everyone checking their mail at least once per day. So, we can say email marketing is one of the best ways to reach customers.

Now we can think about how we can collect email addresses, how we can design email templates, how we can send emails and, email marketing ideas etc.

Collect email addresses:

If you are planning to do email marketing, it is important to build an email list. Here are some ways to build an email list for your restaurant.

• Website contact us form: You can create a contact us page on your restaurant website page and start collecting email addresses to that form.

• Newsletter sign up form: Through newsletter sign up form on your restaurant website you can collect customers email addresses easily.

• Collect email address from POS database: You can collect email addresses through your restaurant POS system. Most of the restaurant point of sale software's now collecting customers email addresses for sending the bills/receipts after their order. So, you can use that email for your email marketing campaign.

• Collect email addresses in person: Another easier way to get an email is to collect an email address in person. For that, you need to focus on the customer interactions happening in your restaurant and ask for them email addresses and save it.

• Social media and Google ads: You can collect email addresses through social media and other paid ads. Facebook lead generation ads and Google lead generation ads are the examples of paid ads.

Email template designing:

After collecting email address, you need to focus on email template design. Your email design should be attractive, also you need to focus on your brand and need to highlight your offers. With the help of email sending platforms like MailChimp, Sender, etc. you can create attractive and useful designs easily, otherwise you can create good HTML email templates for your campaigns and upload to the mail sending platforms.

Email sending Platforms:

Once email template design is completed, then you can send mail through email sending platforms like MailChimp, SENDER, HubSpot, Omnisend, etc. Most of these platforms provide basic package as free. By using a basic free package, you can send limited no of mails. If you required more features then you can upgrade the package also. Also, you can try for bulk email software for email marketing.

Email marketing content/promotional ideas:

Email content is very important while you are planning to do email marketing. The ultimate goal of these emails is to get people to visit your restaurant. So, if you are running a restaurant then you can send emails regarding offers or discounts happening on your restaurants, weekend offers, welcome mail, inviting customers on special occasions on your restaurant, introducing new menu items to customers, review request, surveys, coupon code, weekly giveaways, etc.

Email marketing advantages:

* Low cost

* Easy to create

* Build strong customer relationship

* Promote new items/offers instantly

* Increase brand awareness

* Generating traffic to your site

* Measurable

Conclusion

Email marketing is an excellent way to reach your customers with low cost. It is very effective for small and big businesses. So, try to build an email list today itself!