Sunday, November 27, 2011

How Restaurant Marketers Build Big Email Newsletter Lists

Email followup is an awesome way for virtually any small business to sell more and keep customers happy. Restaurant marketers may be puzzled about how to convince patrons to join their opt-in email lists—there's a disconnect between sitting down for a fabulous meal and opening an email some other time. Overcome this barrier by taking a two-pronged approach to getting diners on your list.

Make It Easy to Join
Restaurant-goers come at you from a lot of different angles. Make sure they know about your email newsletter no matter how they find you. Add an opt-in box to your webpages—all of them. Add an opt-in box to social networking sites like Facebook, and mention the newsletter in your Twitter feed. Online Yellow Page writeups should include a newsletter blurb. Don't forget those occasional business listings across the web such as your local Chamber of Commerce, local newspapers, Yahoo! City Pages, etc.

Offline, include an option for the customer to write her email address on contact forms, printed coupons, in your guest book, on surveys, and on your take-out bags. Run a contest among your servers to see who can collect the most customer emails. Ask people who call in for reservations. Be polite—always tell diners you have an email newsletter so they aren't surprised to hear from you.

Stress the Benefits of Opening Your Emails

Make your specials truly special. The “buy one get one half off” deal is old-school. Do a free bottle of wine with the purchase of four dinners. Try a first-date special, good only for first dates. Run a coupon that gives couples a percent off for each year they've been together. Capitalize on the weather by offering 20 percent off if it's raining, or 30 percent off if the sun is shining.

Coupons are a powerful motivator for restaurant customers, but to keep them opening your emails every time you must offer something more. A chef's corner with exclusive recipes, perhaps? How about short profiles of local celebrities? Or, talk about your community—festivals, block parties, fairs and celebrations.
Build Big Email Lists and Keep the Value Coming.

By taking a multichannel approach to your opt-in invitation, more customers will give you permission to email them. Keep the newsletter in mind while planning every online and offline marketing initiative. Offer value beyond saving money and customers will keep opening your newsletters. Use your imagination to make specials special, and both you and your customers will be happy.

For more information, contact Fidelity Square Marketing.

Fliers & Menus for a Restaurant Business

How to Start Distributing Fliers & Menus for a Restaurant Business

by Regina Anaejionu, Demand Media

The homes, offices, businesses and schools in your area present you with potential restaurant patrons who only need to walk, ride or drive a short distance to experience your establishment. By figuring out the benefits you offer to customers, and taking the time to plan an effective strategy, you can successfully market your restaurant to clients stress-free.

Step 1

Determine your target consumers. If your restaurant is open late and serves coffees, teas and other beverages with caffeine, you might consider marketing to apartment complexes that house college students. If your restaurant is family-friendly with booster seats, high chairs, crayons and reduced-price kid’s meals, then families should be your target.

Step 2

Plan your areas. Flier and menu printing can get expensive in bulk so it is best to leave them where they are most likely to be received well. Many city websites offer detailed demographic data about each neighborhood, allowing you to find the best places to distribute fliers based on age, income or other factors.

Step 3

Design fliers that appeal to the area and market they will be distributed to. Segmenting is the process of developing different materials for multiple groups. If your restaurant appeals to a wide variety of people, you may want to design three to five separate fliers that include relevant graphics or information. A flier left at an office building should appeal to a worker's desire for a quick yet comforting lunch, or morning and mid-afternoon caffeine needs.

Step 4

Set a schedule. Be purposeful about the time of day that you distribute fliers. For instance, office buildings should receive fliers in the morning, so that your restaurant is fresh in people's minds at lunch time.

Step 5

Add a special offer or code to your flier. When you add a promotion that people have to mention or a coupon that they bring with them you are able to track your flier distribution system. Offers like these can create a sense of urgency with your customers and cause them to try your restaurant sooner.

Step 6

Hire a company that specializes in flier and menu delivery or recruit employees to help with distribution. Many companies offer door-to-door distribution services and some even offer tracking programs so you can see where their employees are throughout the process. This can lighten the load on you and give you the peace-of-mind that your marketing materials are reaching their targets.

For more information, contact Fidelity Square Marketing.

3 Ideas On How to Market Your Restaurant Using Facebook

* Online restaurant profile - Start off by creating an attractive profile for your restaurant. The profile needs to have good quality photos, videos and contact details of your restaurant. This shall help users to know about your restaurant, get an idea about its ambience, know about your cuisine, special foods and time to time offers and discounts which you will have to update time and again. This is quite similar to an online advertisement for your restaurant.

* Build Groups - One of the best ways to promote your restaurant is by building groups or joining an existing one. Such groups help to bring people together of similar interest and like minded people. You can create groups for your restaurant on the basis of food, regions and theme of restaurant also. People who have similar likings for such food, or who would like to encourage or promote that restaurant or food or region usually become members of such restaurants. This, way their innumerable friends get to know about such restaurants and foods - in a way building reputation for your restaurant.

* Make friends - Creating an online profile is not enough, you need to be very active, or else your online profile is not going to help you. You need to make the profile active by constantly interacting with other Facebook members and making friends. When you are networking, it is suggested to specially choose all those people who have like-minded interests and inclinations. This shall help you to market your restaurant since they will eager to know more about you and what you have to offer.

One of the few things you need to remember when you are using these social networking sites is that you should post only authentic and true information related to your restaurant. If you post any false or irrelevant information, it shall hamper your online reputation because your guests will visit your restaurant soon and they shall find out everything.

For more information, contact Fidelity Square Marketing.

4 Simple Tips To Catapult Your Restaurant Brand Name On Facebook

Who hasn’t tried Facebook? Who doesn’t even know Facebook? I’d be hard pressed to find someone without a Restaurant City or Farmville account. Simply put, Facebook has become one of the most visited—or overcrowded—websites over the last couple years. A study shows that 6 billion minutes are spent every day on Facebook all over the world. The question: what does this mean for your restaurant? Get that worried look off your face. If anything, Facebook brings a lot of blessings to your restaurant—or any business, for that matter. Facebook is a household name. It’s a place where millions of people hang out. Facebook is one of the most popular websites on the internet. Therefore Facebook is a marketing machine.
But take note there more than 700,000 other businesses are competing for people’s attention on Facebook. Your restaurant is just one of them. But what am I here for, right? Here are 4 effective strategies to advertise on Facebook and gain a loyal following.

1. Add, add, add friends
Facebook is a gem for business owners because it connects friends with friends and friends of friends of friends. The same goes for maintaining an active business page for your restaurant. Keep adding people to your friend list. Add as many as 5,000 friends, or more. Don’t stop adding until you hit that magic number.

2. Create a fan page for your restaurant
A fan page is where your fan and followers can post their ideas and suggestions about your brand name in an open forum. It encourages discussion and brand awareness. So as soon as you’ve created an account on Facebook, proceed to creating a Facebook fan page for your restaurant. And remember – keep the fan page updated as often as you can.

3. Keep the fan page active by publishing interesting content
After a brief biographical background of your restaurant, you need to keep updating your fan page with fresh, interesting content to keep it going. There’s no concrete rule on how many times a fan page requires an update. But a good rule to remember is at least twice a day, usually before the major meals – lunch and dinner. Add mouth-watering pictures of your delicious recipes and offerings. Who knows? You might just attract the taste buds of a hungry friend or two.

4. Find a partner
Two heads is better than one, right? Right.
Go around your neighborhood and search for businesses with a fan page on Facebook. Ask them that if they’d be kind enough to promote your business on their fan page, you’d happily do the same on yours. The more partners you have, the better. This way you could still market your restaurant to people outside your market range without looking like an outsider.

Follow these tips when creating your Facebook fan page, and update me with your results.
Tell me what you think by leaving a message after this post.

For more information, contact Fidelity Square Marketing.

http://www.restaurantmarketingzone.com/online-restaurant-marketing

Friday, November 25, 2011

Why You Shouldn't Use Groupon

I often get this question from restaurant owners and managers about Groupon.

Should I use Groupon to attract hundreds of people to my place?

My answer is simple. No, you shouldn't. And the reason is very simple.

It is true that Groupon could bring many customers to your business but the question that you should ask yourself is: Are these the kind of customers that you want?

Not only your profit margin will be minuscule (if any) after all the fees that you must pay to Groupon and all the (big) discounts that you must give to these customers but, by definition, you will bring people who are addicted to bargains. If your hope is to capture these customers so that they will love your place and come back to your restaurant, I have bad news for you: They won't. Instead, they will go to the next restaurant that gives them a new Groupon offer.

Instead, try something different: Spend your marketing budget in your existing customers.
Yes, that's right. Treat your regular customers like kings and queens. Surprise them with something extra that they don't expect. Woo them with impeccable service and excellent food. Give them some free dishes or gift certificates so that they come back another time. Make your best effort to convince them (with facts, no words) that your restaurant is their favorite restaurant in the city.

Not only you will expend less money than trying to bring hundreds of cheap customers to your place, but these customers who you already have in your restaurant will come back and bring their friends and family members with them. They will become your best salesforce because people trust their friends and family members more than any fancy advertising. And, as an added bonus, they will be so happy with your business that they will express their opinions in blogs and forums all over the place.

When somebody is looking to try a new restaurant, they go to the Internet and look for reviews. If yours scores very high in customer satisfaction, this is the best advertisement that you can buy at any price.

For more information, contact Fidelity Square Marketing

Restaurant Marketing Tips: Beyond Coupons

How can email help restaurants best capitalize on a dining market while the local fast food joint pump out millions of burgers faster and cheaper?
As the first of a series, in this article I’ll offer advice on how quality oriented restaurants can use email marketing to increase their profits through cultivating a base of regular customers, something that could benefit a business of any type.

Return Customers Make the Difference

During my late teenage years, I started my first job at a restaurant, mostly because I needed steady employment while starting college. I was also interested in cooking on the side, and my parents liked the idea of my learning how to increase my food to mess ratio in their kitchen.
During my tenure, I worked with a few chefs (who were also the owners) and learned how important it is to draw customers back in. Getting a customer in the door can really cost a pretty penny when you consider the price of print advertisement.
Meanwhile, by cultivating a regular customer base, restaurants:

lower the cost / visit ratio
get free, effective advertisement by word of mouth

This is easier said than done, however. A good restaurant covers the food and the experience, but people are busy and there’s lots of restaurants in most towns. People like to try different things, so you can’t rely entirely on their own initiative to return.
So what is a restaurant to do? Print more coupons in the local paper that cost money and lower profitability?

The Common Approach

I still make messes in my own kitchen, but I’ve left the real food making to the pros. Since then, I’ve worked with AWeber on helping clients optimize their email campaign results.
I’ve seen a lot of customers fixating on price and giving sales pitches that focus on it. In coming up with ideas, it seems natural to start with what hits your subscribers’ pockets. For restaurants, we find coupons and specials in campaigns: weekly specials, birthday specials, valentine’s day specials, and so on, and so on…
Coupons are a great way to provide a particular of incentive for a visit to a restaurant, but remember that if all customers are looking for in a restaurant is value in a calories per dollar sense, they’ll choose the fast food joint every single time.

Beyond Coupons

What really makes a restaurant special? These USPs (unique selling points) are the points that should be highlighted in an email campaign. In helping a restaurant write its messages, I might ask them:

Why are your desserts the best thing since Tiramisu?
Is your wait staff always standing by, politely waiting to pour that next glass of cellared wine?
How experienced is your chef?

The personal touch that’s so important at restaurants is just as important in email campaigns. By writing messages that highlight their unique qualities, restaurants can take the first impression customers have about their restaurant and build something more lasting.
Lasting impressions lead to return visits and reduce the cost of the constant advertisement to draw in new customers. Instead of driving profits into the ground, why not increase the value using an email campaign?

Sounds Good. Care to Elaborate?

In the coming weeks and months, we’ll cover some ideas concerning ways you can effectively use an email service to not only set yourself apart from the giants but also the competition right next door on your block.
We’ll also chime in with some ideas on how to most effectively generate a list of subscribers from a customer base at your restaurant.
Until then, 86 on this post (if you own/work-at a restaurant, you know what I mean).
For more information on email marketing for restaurants, view our contact Fidelity Square Marketing.

Restaurant Marketing: 5 List-Building Ideas

On Your Website

As part of the research for this post, I looked at a number of restaurant websites, and was struck by the fact that most of them did not offer any email signup at all.
This is a no-brainer for any business. Get a signup form on your website already!
Restaurants in particular should put a signup form in at least two places:

The homepage
Their menu page (if you have separate pages for lunch/dinner, all the better – get the form on each of them)

Ideally, you should have a signup form on your other pages as well, but your home page and menu/s are a good start.

In Person At Your Restaurant

Comment cards have been popular for years at restaurants.
Include an email signup on those cards and bring them with the check!

Be sure to bring a pen with the check, too – even before you know if the customer is paying by credit card. That way, they can pass the time (while the server brings them their change or runs their credit card) by signing up to your email list!

With Takeout/Delivery Orders

Insert a card promoting your email campaign with your takeout and delivery orders.
Simply put your site URL on it and tell people to go there to subscribe.
Or, for a twist have them fill out a form on the card and bring it in on their next visit (this could work well where you’re offering a signup incentive like a coupon or half-price menu item).

On Menus and Other Promotional Pieces

Do you offer paper menus for customers to take away? Or send direct mail pieces?
If so, mention your emails on them.
As with the takeout cards, you may want to have people fill out something in person and then bring it back to your restaurant – that way, not only do they not have to wait until they’re at their computer to sign up, but they have an extra incentive to come back (to drop off the card and get whatever bonus you’re offering new members)!

When People Make Reservations

You don’t have to wait for customers to finish their meals before offering an email signup. Heck, you don’t even have to wait for them to arrive at your restaurant!

Someone making a reservation is identifying him/herself as a customer, someone especially interested in your restaurant (compared to say, someone who happens to visit your website but is not yet committed to coming in and dining with you).

If you take reservations on your site, you should be doing so, too. It helps drive repeat business.
In theory, you should also be doing this when taking reservations by phone, but to be honest I haven’t quite worked out when during the reservation I would ask that, or how I would word it (your suggestions are quite welcome here!).

For more information on email marketing for restaurants, view our contact Fidelity Square Marketing.

Restaurant Marketing Tips: Meet the Chef

In our last post, we established that there’s more to an email campaign than economic incentive. You need to build a relationship that establishes unique selling points to cultivate a return customer base.
Who better to establish these points than the lead creative force of your company? In the case of a restaurant, the head creator is the chef.
In this article, I’ll describe how introducing your chef can add a personal face to your email campaign and how even if you don’t have a restaurant, this type of message can benefit your own business.

Chefs Have Personality

We all love cooking shows. Consider the success of Emeril Lagasse, Julia Child, and (my personal favorite) Alton Brown. People look at them as master chefs, but we know the likelihood of ever tasting one of their dishes is as thin as the demi glaze on the seared filet mignon we see on our TV screens.
By contrast, what happens when customers come to your restaurant? Plates arrive in front of us and they look delicious, but we have no vision of where it came from and who made it. In most restaurants, the gap between the kitchen and the front end is as thick as the drywall that separates them.
Now, imagine the best of both worlds: having your chef come out to greet every table at your restaurant, serving dishes to your customers, explaining the freshness of the ingredients and the uniqueness of the plate.

Meet the Chef

In an ideal world, wouldn’t this be great? Wouldn’t your customers swoon over the idea of knowing who made their food, taking that personal touch to the next level?
Unfortunately, your chef has plenty on their hands, like, well, cooking. They don’t have the benefit of a production crew or the time to leave the kitchen every 5 minutes to greet each customer.
Luckily, if you’re collecting customers’ email addresses at your restaurant for your email list, you have options.


Fidelity Square Marketing (http://fidelitysquaremarketing.com)

Have your head cook write up a ‘Meet the Chef’ message to introduce themselves. Need a few ideas for this email? They could:

highlight their experience
tell a story behind the creation of a dish
explain the nuances of a dish and provide a special coupon for it
provide an exclusive recipe
narrate a day of cooking at your restaurant
introduce cooking staff and give a tour of the kitchen
give nutritional information on your dishes

.. and the list of ideas can go on and on. You want to keep your email short and sweet, so you might even consider starting a series of messages.

By using your email campaign to give your chef a voice and a face, you maximize the use of their time while adding value to your campaign and your restaurant.

For more information on email marketing for restaurants, view our contact FidelitySquare Marketing.

Restaurant Marketing: Have You Updated Your Facebook Page?

Too many restaurants and retailers continue to use their Facebook profiles page to represent their business. If you're still using your profile page, then you need to convert it to a business page. Here's what Facebook says:

According to our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, Facebook profiles are intended to represent individual people only. It is a violation of these guidelines to use a profile to represent a brand, business, group, or organization. As such, your account may be disabled for violating these guidelines.

If you would like to continue to represent your brand, business, group, or organization on Facebook, you should convert your profile to a Page. During this process, all the friends of your profile will be converted to followers of your Page (i.e., people who like it). In addition, the account associated with your profile will be converted to a business account, from which you can administrate your Page and your ad campaigns.

For more information, contact Fidelity Square Marketing.

Restaurant Marketing: What's So Special About Your Restaurant?

Restaurant Marketing: For those who I've worked with and those who subscribe to my WOW newsletter, you know I'm big on getting you to develop and verbalize your special advantage - the element that makes your restaurant different and more memorable than the others.

The challenge remains - most restaurant owners don't know their competitive advantage, or don't know what makes them special. And certainly their staff doesn't. It's critical to understand and communicate your advantage because the landscape - especially the online landscape is now more cluttered than ever before, and with restaurants on standby to be part of Google Plus' business sites, it's only going to get worse.

The cluttered online landscape means your guests' attention is fleeting. You've got 5 seconds to fascinate.

Remember when most restaurant websites looked the same? Well, the same is happening with restaurants on Facebook. They're all starting to look the same.

The one thing that can make you standout is the message you convey. What is it? What makes you special? What makes a guest choose you over your competitor across the street? What is your story? What is your value to your guests? What do you have that no other restaurant has?
Without being able to answer these questions, you become just another restaurant - online and offline.

For more information, contact Fidelity Square Marketing.

8 Things That Make Me Nuts ... And Your Customers Too

8 Things That Make Me Nuts ... And Your Customers Too!

Here are 8 simple mediocre things in restaurants that drive me nuts ... and your customers may be noticing them too:

1. Dirty, unpaved, poorly lit parking lots

2. Fingerprints on the front door

3. Menus with curled up edges, worn-out and smudged with food stains

4. Being told your order will be up in a "sec" and it takes 10 minutes

5. Your drink is delivered with the hands of the server on the glass where you place your lips

6. Not understanding the difference between fresh and fresh frozen. It can't be both.

7. Bakery items in restaurants like Panera or Dunkin and even in grocery stores where people can't tell you the date and time when the baked goods came out of the oven. To respond, "this morning" is not acceptable.

8. Sloppy hand-written posted signs that say we no longer accept coupons or some other "we don't" thing.

Oh, there's much more. But what do you think? Let me know what drives you nuts?

For more information, contact Fidelity Square Marketing.