This post is written by Dan Scudder, VP Business Development at Privy. Privy helps restaurants grow their email list and drive sales.
One of the keys to building a long-term successful restaurant email marketing program is to have a robust customer database.
A robust restaurant email marketing database allows you to easily market to customers and drive sales. Your restaurant’s database should include email addresses, purchase history, and any available customer “insights”, such as demographics, social profiles, etc. Those elements allow you to keep your messaging relevant. Of course, not all of this data is easily compiled. It’s important to take simple steps to collecting the right customer data, sooner rather than later.
We’ve seen restaurants be successful with their database growth. Here are 3 great examples to grow a restaurant’s email marketing database:
1. Drive New Email Signups With A First-Time Customer Offer
One of the best ways to grow your email list and drive first-time customers into your restaurant is with a long-running (“always on”) offer that’s only available to first-time customers.
When people visit your website, they should see the offer and be able to opt-in to your list. This opt-in process should provide an offer to first-time customers. Across all restaurants we work with, we see about 35% of these people use the offer – so it’s a simple way to drive database growth and sales.
2. Promote Limited-Time Offers
Fast growing restaurants are constantly opening up new locations.
Driving sales to each new location is incredibly important to the long-term success of that location. Run a restaurant email marketing offer that can only be redeemed during a “grand opening” window. You can promote the offer on your website and only make it visible to customers in certain areas. This will drive incremental email list growth, specific to the areas of your new locations. Also, try emailing the offer out to your existing email database. It will drive more insights to your database – such as who your loyal customers are and who your deal-seeking customers are.
3. Be Active About Email Signups Without Offers
Some restaurants are adverse to offers. This makes sense in certain cases, because you do not want to train your customers to look for discounts all the time. You may also have high-end pricing, that coincides with a premium menu, that you don’t want to tarnish with a discount. But, you can still actively grow your customer database using a simple email signup popup. A popup with exit-intent targeting capabilities can rapidly grow your restaurant email marketing database.
Restaurants operate in very difficult and competitive environments. The best restaurants know how to build and leverage their email marketing database. By doing so, they can grow their brand, customer relationships, and boost sales.
Restaurant email marketing is one of the lowest cost ways to promote your restaurant. If you’re actively adding to your database, email marketing will pay immediate and long-term dividends.
