Does your restaurant have an email newsletter?

There’s a reason email marketing is so popular. The ROI is massive. Research from Litmus finds that email has an average ROI of $42 for every single dollar spent. That’s impossible to ignore.

But just because the average ROI is high doesn’t mean that you should grow complacent with your efforts. You want to maximize your investment.

Here’s four easy ways to get your restaurant’s email newsletter in perfect form.

Build it around a CTA. Your CTA (call-to-action) should form the backbone of your email newsletter. Why are you sending this email? What is the intended action that you want customers to take? Don’t be too general. You want to be specific here. Here’s a few restaurant-specific examples.

  • Place an order for takeout or delivery
  • RSVP to an event
  • Check out your updated menu
  • Follow your social media page
  • Attend a Happy Hour

You need a killer subject line. Want your email to actually get opened in the first place? Kick it off with a compelling subject line.

Your subject line is perhaps the most crucial component of any email you’ll send. If you spend a ton of time creating an amazing email newsletter, it’ll all be for nothing if you don’t pair it with a subject line that convinces customers to open. Your subject line doesn’t have to include your CTA. Rather it should support it by incentivizing the customer to open.

You can do this by suggesting value (deal inside!), piquing their curiosity (guess what we’ve added to the menu!), leveraging urgency (check out this special before it’s gone!), among other methods. There are tons of strategies for writing effective subject lines. If you need a little extra help, here’s one of our articles featuring five tips for writing subject lines that get opened.

Show off your menu with delectable imagery. You’re running a restaurant. What do you think your customers want to look at?

If your emails feature too much writing, you may want to reevaluate. According to Campaign Monitor, 65% of customers prefer emails when they’re mostly composed of images. Being in the restaurant industry, you’re in luck. As you surely already know, people love looking at pictures of food. Email newsletters present an opportunity to show off the visual elements of your menu.

A few extra tricks. There’s no shortage of tricks email marketers use to improve performance. Here’s a few tricks I’ve catered for your benefit.

  • Did a customer just subscribe to your newsletter? Send them a welcome email. Not only do customers expect to receive welcome emails when subscribing, they’re far more likely to respond to them in the first place. According to Invesp, welcome emails recieve four times more opens and five times more clicks.
  • Try using emoji in your subject lines. A report from Experian found that 56% of brands using this practice found higher unique open rates. Courtesy of Emojipedia, click here for a list of emoji related to food and drink.
  • Give A/B testing a shot. If you haven’t tried A/B testing, I highly recommend it. It’s the process of trying different versions of your email campaigns with different audience segments to determine which methods get the best results. Try different subject lines, different times, etc.

Promote With CoGoBuzz

Now that you know how to improve your newsletter, let’s start building your restaurant’s email list. With CoGoBuzz, we’ll empower your existing CRM and Email Marketing accounts with industry-leading technology. Our service leverages your in-business WiFi to collect profile information from guests via Facebook, Email Address, or Phone Number logins. We’ll store customer profiles and automatically integrate them with your Marketing List of choice, including HubSpot, MailChimp, and Constant Contact.

Click here to learn more about CoGoBuzz!

What does your restaurant’s newsletter look like? Let us know in the comments!

 

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