Spread Your Restaurant Marketing Emails Virally using Social Media

Email has always been a warhorse when it comes to restaurant marketing on the internet. It’s a free and easy way of maintaining contact with diners long after they’ve finished their after dinner coffee so you can entice them back with special offers and reminders of what a pleasant evening they had. Email continues to be a valuable tool, only now you can supercharge it by connecting it with social media to spread your messages virally.

Getting your offers and messages spread as widely as possible is always one of your restaurant marketing’s key aims. And the ease with which people can now share links and information with 100s or 1000s of people on social media sites, like Facebook or Twitter, is too big an opportunity to ignore.

If you want to encourage recipients of your email messages to share them with friends and family it helps to give them a little nudge. You can do this by including links suggesting people ‘Share on Facebook’, ‘Email to a friend’ or ‘Tweet this’ in the email.

Another benefit of combining email with social media is that you can turn on your restaurant marketing into more of an ongoing conversation. A problem with email is that the messages are static and the only way for a customer to start a conversation is to reply privately. However, by linking your emails to your Twitter feed or Facebook fan page you give people a way of engaging with you in an ongoing and open manner.

So the next time you put together an amazing offer to be emailed to customers, help them to spread it virally by including links to all the popular social networking sites.

Update: Also see this recent study on increasing newsletter reach through “sharing links” produced by GetResponse.

By Louise Routledge in Blog, Restaurant Marketing, Social Media Marketing