John has recently retired from his full-time job. It was always his dream to have his own restaurant.
After putting efforts into it for six months, it is the big day today. He has been working with a local advertising agency for billboard advertising.
Apart from the billboard, he also did other promotional activities. The opening day was a good day for John.
Now John wants to know more about how to increase sales in a restaurant business. He figures out that his competitors are leveraging email, missed call and SMS for marketing.
Email Marketing for Restaurant Business
How happy do you feel after receiving a special offer from Zomato or Swiggy? Does it motivate you to make the order? Your customers are always looking for new dishes to explore or discounts for a get-together party. With email marketing, you create an everlasting relationship with your customers.
4 Benefits of Email Marketing for Restaurant
Ask any restaurant owner about email marketing. They will certainly give a sigh of bliss. Why so?
- Customers Love It: Not sure about the most preferred communication channel? A study by Marketing Sherpa shows that 72% of American adults prefer to be communicated by email over any other channel.
- Insightful Analytics: Using email marketing software along with restaurant CRM software will provide you with data that talks.
Wondering what can you track? Here are some of them:
- How many customers of yours opened the mail – Open Rate
- Which links were clicked and at what frequency – Click Rate
- What day and time of the week got more open and click rate
- Higher ROI: Can you remember the last time when you got $44 for every $1 you spend? Probably not. According to a study by Campaign Monitor, the best email marketing services for restaurants can bring them an insane ROI of 44:1.
- Well-designed Loyalty Program: Do you already have a loyalty program? When you gamify such loyalty programs, your customers may spend 39 percent more than the usual.
6 Email Marketing Tips for Restaurants
Search for five minutes on Google. It will give you plenty of results on tips on how to increase restaurant sales.
Why do you need to read these six tips then? Because Teleduce by Corefactors helps in restaurants in running automated email marketing campaigns.
And that’s why you need to hear straight from the horse’s mouth.
1. Master Email Marketing Campaign Basics
Before delving deep into email marketing ideas for restaurants, you need to master the art of creating effective emails. That’s what this is all about.
- Building Recipient Database: Whom are you trying to reach? You target audience should include customers who visit your restaurants regularly, prospects who visit your website, people residing in the locality in which you operate your business.
- Finding Optimal Time: When are you planning to send these emails? Timing matters. While optimal time varies depending on your target audience, you can always target Thursdays and Fridays to increase footfall during the weekends.
- Writing Effective Subject Lines: You shouldn’t be writing deceptive subject lines in your emails. For example, if you are offering up to a 25% discount, don’t mention a guaranteed 25% discount. This can result in high unsubscription rates.
- Adhere to CAN-SPAM Act: According to the CAN-SPAM Act, you are expected to provide your customers with necessary instructions for opting out. Once they opt-out, they will not be receiving your future emails.
2. Personalized Promotional Offers
Don’t you love it when a restaurant sends you a 10% discount coupon on your birthday?
Well, your customers will love it too. Use beautiful email templates for restaurant marketing not only to keep them abreast of the current menu but also about the ongoing special hours and other offers.
Before sending restaurant promotions, make sure that your existing customers are categorized into segments such as:
- Existing customers who have walked in
- Customers who made an order online
- Those who have availed of offers earlier
- People who signed up for happy hours
Bonus: Have a look at a comprehensive guide that will give you insights into doing email marketing for small businesses. You will be getting tips for creating lead magnet as well.
3. Retargeting Website Visitors
Not familiar with retargeting? Retargeting is nothing but targeting those who have already seen your website page once. At this stage, you need to create an attractive lead magnet that will persuade them to opt-in. In this lead magnet, you can introduce offers, discounts, recipes, food tips, and so on. Additionally, integrating online ordering systems for restaurants can be a lead magnet that streamlines the dining experience and attracts customers.
4. Nurturing Through Loyalty Program
Your loyal customers are those who keep coming back to your restaurant because of the atmosphere, hospitality, food, price, location, etc.
To make them keep coming back, you must have a loyalty program.
Use the best restaurant email marketing software to send updates, monthly specials, and event notices to these loyal customers. Nurturing is the key to success.
5. Follow-up Email For Online Customers
Are your customers ordering online? If you have a website through which they are coming in, chances are high that you have their email address as well.
Once you capture their email address, you can set up an automated feedback mail for positive reviews and repeat customers. This should be as easy as ABC with top email marketing software.
6. Attract Deal Seekers
Are you offering exclusive deals on any local website or websites like Groupon?
Now you can convert these deal seekers into repeat customers with email marketing.
The only thing that you have to do is to get their email address using the comment card. You can also use a table-side sign-up form.
Keep nurturing them with deals similar to the one they came to redeem. This is one of the best ways to increase restaurant sales without advertising.
Missed Call Marketing for Restaurant Business
Running an operation-heavy food delivery network isn’t easy. It requires you to empower your stakeholders with efficient communication tools while keeping the cost low.
As a restaurant owner, cloud telephony is the biggest weapon you can have in your arsenal. With cloud telephony and missed call marketing from Teleduce, you stay ahead of your competitors.
4 Benefits of Missed Call Marketing for Restaurant
When you run an online food delivery network, you must ensure a superior customer experience. Any delay in communication between stakeholders can cause a loss for you. That’s why you need to leverage cloud telephony. Here are the benefits of it:
Automated Call for Order Notification
Think you have got a busy day at your restaurant. You are literally running between the kitchen and front desk to ensure a smooth customer experience. Now you start receiving orders online.
Unless you are in front of your computer, there is no way you can see them and initiate the process.
That’s why Teleduce has introduced automated calls that will be triggered once you receive an order. This helps your team to deliver the food on time.
Number Masking
Protecting the customer’s identity is the biggest concern for business owners today. Your delivery team can make the call without seeing the number of your customers. This is called number masking. With Teleduce lead management system, you can do this at ease.
Reconfirmation of COD Orders
Have you ever got a Cash on Delivery order rejected after your delivery executive reached the location to deliver food? An automated reconfirmation call can help you to have all the COD orders confirmed. This way you save the time of your team and increase productivity.
Table Booking with Missed Call
Are you making it easy for your customers to make a reservation? Let them book a table at your restaurant with a simple missed call.
For this, you will have to display your missed call number across offline and online media channels. Once your customers call that number, it will automatically get disconnected.
You can integrate with SMS so that your customer receives a confirmation and you receive a notification. Here are some other ways you can leverage missed call marketing to increase sales in a restaurant business.
3 Missed Call Marketing Tips for Restaurants
Teleduce by Corefactors, the best restaurant CRM system, combines the power of email, sms, and cloud telephony so that you get to communicate with your customers without moving to different platforms.
Here are some of the tips for you to make the most out of missed call marketing for restaurant.
Missed Call for Feedback
People love the idea of a missed call. Not because they save money but because it is convenient for them.
There is nothing stopping you from leveraging this marketing channel. Display a missed call number across all marketing channels. Ask your customers to provide you with feedback.
Now you can have your customer support members calling the disgruntled customers via cloud telephony. Unhappy customers don’t bring business to you. You better be listening to your customers.
Missed Call for Customer Retention
When you run a promotional offer, how do you generate traffic? There are plenty of ways to promote your offer or discount. You can publish an advertisement or have your local advertising agency put up a billboard. All these efforts are going to cost you more money. You can get more customers with a missed call number. And, more importantly, it costs you less.
Address Problems with Toll-free Number
You can either continue growing with happy customers or go down with the unhappy ones.
That’s why every service-oriented business considers customer feedback to be very important.
Create a multi-layer Interactive Voice Response system with Teleduce. With this toll-free number, your customers will be able to register a complaint, talk to an executive, make a reservation, and much more.
This is one of the best marketing methods to adopt when you want to increase beverage sales in restaurants.
Bonus: If you are planning to set up a toll-free number, here is an IVR Basics Guide for you!
SMS Marketing for Restaurant Business
Are you giving credit points to your existing customers? Or, do you want to send a confirmation message for table reservation?
SMS marketing software for restaurant takes care of all such things. People see their SMS even in this era of Whatsapp.
The open rate for text messages stand at 98% today! SMS is absolutely crucial when you want to increase sales in a restaurant business.
4 Benefits of SMS Marketing for Restaurant
How often do you receive text messages from your preferred restaurants? If they have your phone number, chances are high that you will be receiving messages just before the weekend or happy hours.
There is a reason behind that investment. While ROI might not be immediate, it certainly works in the long run.
Promote Exclusive Offers
Take any food delivery app or table reservation app like Zomato or DineOut.
They are giving their customers insane offers like 1+1, discount, etc. With SMS marketing, you can also beat your competitors. Get started by sending weekly discount offers, vouchers, etc.
Confirm Table Reservation
With SMS marketing, you can send automated table reservation confirmation messages. This brings down the no-show rate significantly. In addition, you can also send cancellation text messages.
Automated Staff Rostering
If you own a restaurant with 20+ employees, you can’t just do manual staff rostering. With SMS marketing, you can keep them aware of work schedules and any last-minute changes.
Create Polls
If you just started offering a new dish at your restaurant, you can promote that. Once enough people visit your restaurant to taste that dish, you can run a poll to receive feedback on the same. This makes it insanely easy for you to increase small restaurant sales.
4 SMS Marketing Tips for Restaurants
How likely are you to visit a restaurant after receiving a promotional SMS from them? When you send SMS at the right time to the right people, you increase your chances of getting a higher ROI.
Promote Events
If you are offering Happy Hour deals, you should be scheduling SMS ahead of time. Imagine another scenario – what happens when you send 20% discount offer before they leave office on Friday?
Choosing the right time and the right people are the key to success when it comes to SMS marketing.
Introduce New Dishes
Adding a new dish to your menu? A growling stomach would be delighted to have such surprises. When you have an existing customer list, trigger a campaign mentioning the new dish that you just added to your menu.
Receive Feedback
Smiling customers are the greatest asset because they are not only customers but also advocates.
With SMS marketing campaigns, you can capture their feelings about the overall dining experience at your restaurant. This tip should top your list when you are looking forward to increasing restaurant sales.
Announce New Location
Did you just open a new branch? SMS marketing campaigns can help you to get the word out. With a powerful tool like SMS, boundaries are limitless.
Final Thoughts
Whether you are planning to open a restaurant or already have an established one, marketing channels like SMS, email, and missed calls are great tools to improve restaurant sales.
While you can continue advertising in a traditional manner, those traditional channels often fail to deliver a personalized message.
That’s why you need an integrated Sales CRM and Marketing Automation Software like Teleduce which costs less but delivers more.
Want to know more? Take your restaurant marketing to the next level with Teleduce today!