Tips on writing restaurant marketing emails

Collecting your customers’ email addresses should be one of your core restaurant marketing strategies. Doing so gives you the chance to maintain contact with customers long after their meal and entice them back to book another table.

But what should you write? And what are the best email marketing practices? Following these tips should help:

Keep emails brief – People have more distractions then ever competing for their attention. Their time is precious and they’re easily annoyed if they think it’s being wasted. So you should avoid sending long winded messages on irrelevant subjects, such as the amusing thing your cat did or how many tables you filled last night. Instead you should keep your emails fairly brief and to the point. This will be enough to give customers the key information without taking up too much of their time.

Friendly, conversational tone – Restaurants are where people go to enjoy themselves, relax and unwind. You’ll want to reflect this in your emails by making them fun, cheerful and friendly, rather than read like a lifeless sales message. So how can you write in a friendly tone if you’re not a natural writer? A good tip is to write how you talk, using everyday phrases, and read your emails out loud to hear how they sound.

Offer a benefit – To keep customers subscribed, you need to ensure your emails have something of value to offer. Whilst discounts and coupons always go down well, there are other ways of making your emails worth receiving. You could try sharing unique recipe ideas, dinner party tips or advice on buying white wine.

Frequency – Sending too many emails can annoy customers if they feel they’re being ‘spammed’ with messages, whilst not sending enough will hamper your ability to build a closer bond with your customer. Once a month is a sensible frequency to aim for; a good time to send them is on a Friday afternoon when people are itchy to escape the office and looking forward to the weekend.

Include social media links – As discussed in a previous blog post, encouraging your customers to share your messages with all their friends on Facebook and Twitter can help spread your offers virally. Make your emails easy to share by including links to Facebook and Twitter so your message is only a mouse click away from being shared with 100s or 1000s of people.

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By Louise Routledge in Blog, Email Marketing, Restaurant Marketing