[00:00:00] Speaker A: An engaged email list is a restaurant's most powerful asset because it is the preferred mode of communication from consumers with the brands they support.
That has been supported by study after study after study, which means you need a plan. You need a strategy for building a really great email marketing program. On today's episode eight do's and don'ts, the things you need to do to have a really great email program for your restaurant to don't go anywhere.
There's an old saying that goes something like this. You'll only find three kinds of people in the world. Those who see, those who will never see, and those who can see when shown. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking.
Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close and this is Restaurant Strategy Podcast, dedicated solely to helping you build a more profitable restaurant. Each week I leverage my 25 years in the industry to help you build that more profitable and sustainable restaurant. I work with owners and operators all over the world as well. Through my P3 mastermind, I wrote a book and guess what? I am giving away 100 copies of this restaurant book to the first people that do this. Very, very simple. Go to my Instagram handle. So at RestaurantStrategy and DM the Word Book, you will be given a link. To get that book for free, all you have to do is pay shipping. Now, this is very important. It's only for people based in the US we have checked. International shipping rates are way too expensive for us to extend this courtesy. So to everybody out there beyond the United States. I hear you. I'm sorry, I wish I could extend this, but it's just way too expensive. I mean, literally 30, 40, $50 US for me to ship it overseas. For anybody here in the United States who doesn't yet have my book and wants a copy of my book totally free, go to my Instagram feed, right, the Instagram for this show at Restaurant strategy on Instagram, DM me the word book. We will then send you a link so you can get this book for free. All you have to do is pay for shipping. It's the $3 and 92 cents best part, or I should say the really cool part, right, is you also get a free access to my new program. It's called Restaurant Foundations. It's a community with an online course, incredible resources, a monthly masterclass and ask me anything session with me and everybody in this group. You get access to that for free for an entire month. When you do this, if you want to do this, if this Sounds good. Then go do it again. Go to the instagram feed@restaurantstrategy DM the word book and you can get your copy for free and you get a free month in the community. I'm gonna include that link in the show notes as well in case you need somewhere easy to find it. But go do that now.
So Avi, when it comes to guest feedback, how do you recommend restaurants approach managing their reviews?
[00:03:13] Speaker B: Yeah, so there are three things that we highly recommend, right? Number one, block out 30 minutes a week, one day a week, respond to reviews. While it would be nice to respond to all of them, focus on the two, three and four star reviews because that's where you're going to win people over and have room for improvement. Number two, create templates for yourself. Proven templates that you know work for 2, 3, 4, 5 star reviews. Save time. Number three, if you want to take it completely off your plate, come to Marquee. We have a wonderful manage review product. We where we will respond to all of your reviews as a true brand extension and take it completely off your plate.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: And where can people go to learn more about Marquee?
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Come Visit
[email protected] that's M A R Q I I dot com. We look forward to chatting with you.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Okay, so today we're talking all about email marketing, the do's and the don'ts of how you have to put together a really good program. I'm going to keep this really laser focused, but I want to make sure I'm really clear here. I started at the top. I'm going to fortify that here. An engaged email list, your most powerful asset.
Guest capture without data capture is a waste. Right? So if you got people coming in and you don't know who they are, it means you can't communicate with them, means you can't email them back, you can't invite them back. That's what email is. It's a way to invite them back. Now a couple of misnomers before I get into these eight bullet points.
I talk to a lot of people that say, oh, I don't really do it because I don't want to annoy my customers, right? I don't want to piss them off.
You are not pissing them off, I promise you. In fact, they came, they dined with you, they signed up for your list one way or another. They want to hear from you. They love what you do and they want to hear and they want to hear what you're up to. They want to be invited Back, Right? This is true with the places that we support, the places we like. Yeah. If you got a terrible restaurant, then stop bugging people because it's a terrible restaurant. They're not going to come back. But I'm going to assume that if you're listening to this podcast, you've been in business for a little while, that you've got a good product that you know how to take care of. People don't feel like you're annoying them. You're not.
If they're not ready to hear your message or if they're too busy, I promise you, they will just ignore your messages. And I know this through my own habits. And you know this, I think, through your own habits. If you sift through your email box and you realize how often some brands email you, right? I. I was. I was attending this seminar, and the guy up there said, you know, he was talking about email marketing. He said, hey, so, you know, we. We all follow brands, right? Like, who. Who follows brands on their. On their email newsletter, right? And a bunch of us raised our hands and he pointed to me and he said, what's one brand you support that you. That you subscribe to and you get emails from? And I said, best Buy. And he said, okay, great. How many emails did you get from Best Buy this week? I said, I don't know, maybe one, maybe two. And he said, go open your inbox and find that answer. Type in Best Buy and see how many emails they sent you. The answer was five. They had sent me five, five emails in the previous seven days, and I just didn't realize it. The other three or four didn't even register. I remembered getting an email from them, but I didn't realize how many. The bottom line was, I still like Best Buy. I support Best Buy. I'm a customer of Best Buy, and I want to hear from them. I don't need to hear from them all the time. I'm not shopping for a fridge or a TV all the time. But when I am, I want to know what the deals are. I want to know where I can go, how I can order it, et cetera.
So I support them, and they do not piss me off. I just ignore. I just disregard the emails that I'm not ready to receive. But on the merchant side, their job, Best Buy's job, and your job is to stay top of mind with the people who support you, top of mind with your customers. Because guess what? Four months ago, my son comes up to me, runs up from the basement. He says, Daddy, our TV. Something's going on with our TV. Our TV died. And he was absolutely right. It was a 16 year old TV. It was on the fritz. It had just like it just died one morning. So I said, okay, so you know what I did? I went looking in my inbox for the last email from Best Buy. And I said, they must be running some kind of deals. Let me see, let me see what deals they got going on on TVs. And so I became a customer once again. It's a really important lesson. Understand that you will not piss off your guests. Now we're going to talk over the course of this conversation about how to handle that relationship, how to maintain that relationship really well. And that's really what these eight do's and don'ts are all about to help you make money and better serve the people who are on your list. Okay, so we ready? Eight things, eight bullet points, do's and don'ts for how to put together a really great email program. First one, you need a steady cadence. It doesn't have to be all the time. Frequency matters a lot less than consistency. What I think you should do is at least once a week, all right? That's the first thing you need, a steady, consistent cadence.
Frequency matters a lot less than consistency than being consistent. Sending an email at least once a week right now, what days? I don't know, mix it up, change it around, test that. Because if I give you the answer, invariably that's gonna work for some people and not for other people. Be consistent that you send it every week. Play around with what day of the week. Now, number two bullet point. I want you to adopt the one to one to one principle.
One email, one message, one call to action.
So gone are the newsletters from 1997, right? Monthly newsletter, a weekly newsletter. This is everything we've got going on.
It just doesn't work anymore. What happens is that there are things embedded in that long email that some people might be interested in, right? But maybe they didn't realize that was buried in there. So if you got four things to talk about, you have four emails to send. And I know there's certain times of the year that are going to get very, very busy for you. Certainly that was the case.
I worked at Gotham in New York City for eight years. I helped run their marketing program. And there were times of the year, for example, around the holidays, right, where Christmas Eve was a big deal for us, New Year's Eve was a big deal for us. We sold like gift boxes, right? We sold, we had The Gotham Chocolates program. There was a lot to talk about. We also did holiday brunches between Thanksgiving and New Year's, right? There was a lot to talk about over the course of that month. That meant I was sending a lot of emails and we made up for it because then there were less things to send in January, let's say, or March, let's say. But yeah, there are certain times a year where we were sending an email once a day, once every other day to try to fill those big nights for Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve to make sure to sell out our stock of gift boxes and, and chocolates. So, yeah, you need to adopt the one to one to one principle. One email has one message, has one call to action. Be really clear on what you want someone to do when they open and read that email.
If it's about selling your, your line of chocolates, it should, in the subject line, it should let people know what's inside that, right? Introducing our new spring line of bon bons. And then they open it up, there's a beautiful picture, there's a couple of words about why that's so special or what you're doing with this line of chocolates. And then a button that says order now.
Right? So it's very clear I want to tell you about our chocolates. And at the end of it, I want you to be so moved so that you place an order.
It's very, very simple and it doesn't have to be crazy, right? But do not pump an email full of 2, 3, 4, 5 messages unless your message is, we've got a lot going on this month, right?
And then you talk about everything that's going on. But the message is, we got a lot going on. That's the only time I would do it. And I wouldn't, I wouldn't make a habit of that unless you always have a lot going on. And then maybe on the 1st of every month you say, okay, get ready, we got a lot going on this month. Here's everything. And the idea is to mark your calendar or get your tickets or reserve your spots. Now that's fine if you want to send on the 1st of every month, but understand that that's what you're doing and there's a specific strategy involved, right? Number three, the third bullet point here, you gotta remember to provide value to the people on your list. Now, this is overly simplistic, but people are on our list, right? We want them on our list so we can sell to them.
You gotta think the Other way, right? Which is why would someone want to be on our list?
You have every. Every restaurant will answer that differently, right? But you have to honor.
You have to honor the expectations of the consumer, of the diner, of your guests who are on your email list. Now, maybe it's behind the scenes, maybe it's early access, maybe it's discounts, maybe it's promotions. Whatever it is, that's fine. But you have to answer that question. I'm going to talk to you then about how we put together an entire what we talk about in a regular cadence of emails. That'll come up in a couple of bullet points. I just want you to embrace this idea, this idea that we are providing value to the people on the list. We are answering that question, right?
Why would people want to be on our list? Why would they want to hear from us? Our email, Every email we send is a response to that, right? We don't have to overthink it, but we do have to give it some consideration.
Number four, the fourth bullet point I want you to have striking subject lines. A hack that's working right now is to put an emoji in the subject line. If you go through your inbox, take a look and see how many. How many people are actually using emojis in their subject line, and you'll find that hardly any. And so it sticks out. When you scroll down your inbox, the ones with emojis in the subject line stick out. They catch your eye. Doesn't have to be cheap and cheesy. We can do it in an elegant way, but we're just trying to stand out in a busy, flat marketplace, right? If you think of someone's inbox as a marketplace where all these different brands are trying to sell to them, where their friends are trying to talk them into going away or going to dinner or whatever, right? You have to stick out. That's one way we can stick out, right? So emojis in the subject line, and a striking subject line, because your goal with a subject line is to pique people's interest to get them to open that email, right? And then within the email, obviously, you have to move them to take the action you need them to take. But your first thing is to get them to notice you and to open the email, right? So those are the first four bullet points. We're going to cover the next four afterward from another one of our sponsors.
Now, today's episode is brought to you by seven Chefs. Running a restaurant is hard work, right? But managing your team doesn't have to be. So if you're spending hours on scheduling and then chasing down your team through text chains and a bunch of emails back and forth, then you need to check out 7Shifts, a team management platform built specifically for restaurants. With 7Shifts, you can create and publish schedules in minutes. You can communicate with your team and pay your employees all in a single tool. 7Shifts helps your team make more profitable decisions, improve operating efficiency and most importantly, it gives you time back in your day. And right now, restaurant strategy podcast listeners can get three months free. To get started, visit 7shifts.com RestaurantStrategy. That's the number 7s h I f t s.com RestaurantStrategy and get three months of industry leading team management software for free. As always, you'll find that link in the show notes.
Okay, so today we're talking about email do's and don'ts. It is the most powerful channel you have at your disposal because it is virtually free, right? The incremental cost of sending one more email is basically zero, right? And this studies have shown, research has shown over and over, email is the preferred mode of communication between guests or consumers and the brands they support.
Now texting SMS can be a better way to get through because the open rates are almost 100%. But you can't, you can't do that a lot. Think of if you've ever given any money to a political campaign, think about how many times they text you, right? I have done this and I get barraged with text messages and there are some brands that, that over, that over communicate via text. So it, while it can be really powerful, it can be overly used, it can be abused in a way that isn't helpful for our brand. Email, on the other hand, is compartmentalized. People have it in an app. It's something they have to go and, and, and access manually. They've got to be in that frame of mind. But they are in the frame of mind to receive messages at that time versus texts, where texts interrupt you from whatever you're doing. Emails are deliberate. When somebody goes to their inbox, they know what they're going to do. They're going to check if they got new messages. That makes it incredibly powerful. Right? So we've got eight do's and don'ts. We already did the first four. Now the last four. If you want, if you want a time of day, right? So day of the week you got to play around with. If you want a time a day, here's the best thing I've found.
Weekdays between 9 and 11 or 3 and 5, right. Leading up to meal periods and not, not around lunchtime because people get pounded after lunch at 1 and 2 o' clock and they get pounded first thing in the morning, right? They get to their desk, they open up their email and they've got a hundred that came in overnight. You want to be after that crush. So 9 to 11 or 10 to 12 and then in the afternoon 3 to 5. That's what I found works best. Caveat to that is if you're sending e commerce emails, meaning if there's merchandise you want to sell, products, gift boxes, chocolates, that is best. I don't know why, I can't explain why. I mean I can't explain why, but in the evening, sometime between 8 and midnight because people, we find that the e commerce industry thrives between the hours of 10 and 12. Amazon's sales spike every night between 10 o' clock and midnight. It's because people are watching TV, watching a game on the commercial breaks they scroll through or when they're sitting in bed. They shop for the things that they need or that they want or also for e commerce first thing on Saturday morning. I can't explain why, but 9 to 12 always worked really well for the e commerce brands and the e commerce emails that I sent. So if you have a product to sell where people can click it, go buy it on your website weeknights between, let's say eight and midnight and Saturday mornings between nine and noon. Workflow really well, great. So then we're sending these emails. We talked about, hey, the importance of creating value. So what do we talk about? Here is everything you can talk about. So when I say I want you to send minimum one email a week and people respond to me and say, well, I don't have that much to talk about. Yes you do. And I'm going to explain why. I'm going to give you a laundry list of things you can talk about and I never want to hear you say there's nothing to talk about ever again.
First thing, you could talk about some of your signature items. Talk about the recipe, the you know, the genesis of this recipe, talk about the plating, talk about where the inspiration came from. You can feature your signature items, you can feature new dishes that coming onto your menu or a new menu, right. Introducing the new fall menu. Right? You can easily do that. You can feature a new wine, a new wine by the glass you bring on, or a new section of your wine list. You could feature a new cocktail or introducing the new spring cocktails. Right? You could do a feature on your people. So your general manager, your owner, your chef, maybe a busboy who's been there for a long time, right? Feature your people. You can promote your off site catering. You can promote your private dining room. You can share your philosophy, your ethos, what you believe in, why you do what you do, why people should care about what you do. You can talk about some of your partners, so meaning your farmers, your purveyors, your distributors, the people who help give you the great products that you then turn around and sell as a dish, right? You can feature them, you can promote them. You could talk about some of the charity work you do, undoubtedly. I know you support local organizations, you give, you donate, so talk about some of that work. You could talk about unique events that are upcoming, like wine tastings or other special programming. There is so much to talk about. Gone. You, all you have to do. If you send one email a week, you're sending 52 emails a year.
You can just talk about wines, new items, signature dishes. Your people promote your catering and pdr. Talk about your philosophy and ethos. Like, oh my God, it's just a. You just cycle through all that and you'd be hard pressed to keep it just to 52. So if you say you got nothing to talk about, that's absolutely wrong. This is some of the stuff you can talk about.
Number seven, the seventh bullet point is you got to think about how you grow that email list. You need to steadily be adding names, emails to that email list. Here. How do you do it? Bunch of easy ways. Number one, if you take reservations or if you do table management, you are already automatically capturing emails. You can dump those into your email service provider. If you take online orders, you are automatically collecting data. You can dump those into your email service provider. If you have a loyalty program, those can get dumped in.
You should put a pop up on your website. So if you're promoting certain things like Mother's Day or Easter or New Year's Eve reservations and that wants to go on the pop up, fine. But in between the times when you're promoting stuff, you should be capturing email.
You can capture it in the footer, right? So in the footer on your website, you should have a capture form. There you can get your WI fi, meaning you offer free WI fi, but in order to access it, they need to put in their email address. That becomes really valuable because everybody who comes in through that channel, you know, is a customer. They have been to your restaurant, they have dined in your restaurant. Viva Spot is a great company. It's like 19 bucks a month. They do it really well. You're not going to find it cheaper or more effective than that, right? You can do other in store capture through QR codes, through, through postcards, through comment cards, old school. And then you can do community events. There's a whole community event playbook that I talk about. A lot of you have to sift through some old episodes to find that. But when you do a community event, right, like, like a charity night or street fair or something, your goal is not just to give away food and quote unquote, make an impression. Your goal is not to sell food and make money. I mean your goal at a street fair is to make money. The goal should be to like break even or make a little bit of profit. The main focus should be to make contact with the people in your community and capture emails, capture data so that you can send them an offer, so that you can remarket to them, right?
All of those ways are ways to grow that email list and you should be doing almost all of them.
Finally, the eighth bullet point, the last thing I think you need to be doing is you need to follow a ton of other email accounts, right? Ton of other restaurant brands to get inspiration and to get ideas. I follow something like 200 or 250 different restaurants through their email newsletter mostly so I can keep up with what people are doing. So quick service, fast casual, fine dining, e commerce, all over the country, really all over the world. Anytime I travel, I'm always signing up for things. Because the thing is we don't have to come up with these ideas on our own. These ideas are out there and you're going to see something in another market, maybe with a different, totally different kind of restaurant and you're going to go, oh, that's a really good idea. I bet you we can sort of evolve that or adapt that into our restaurant. What if we did something like that? You're going to find out about an event, they're doing, some special programming, some menu they're doing. You will get ideas by following a lot of other smart people and follow independence and follow the big brands. The big brands have spent millions and millions of dollars on their marketing. We can learn a lot from them. They have already done all the trial and error. We can just see what they're doing and try to emulate as best as possible. When it comes to email marketing, just know that you have to do it. These were the do's and don'ts, right? What to do what not to do, just eight bullet points to help you get started or focus what you're already doing. Again, really quickly, here are the eight things. Number one, you need a steady cadence at least once a week. Frequency matters less than being consistent.
Number two, you're going to adopt the one to one to one principle. One email, one message, one call to action. Understand why you want someone to open the email and what they're supposed to do after they've read your email.
Number three, remember, you have to provide value to the people on the list. You have to honor their time in whatever way that means. Number four, you got to have striking subject lines. The subject line, the goal is to get them to open that email. Emojis help. Go look through your email, your inbox and you'll see what I mean. Number five, right? If you want a time to send, it's before lunch, before dinner, or if you're an E commerce brand, in the evening between 8 midnight or first thing Saturday morning. Number six, right, I've got nothing to talk about. I gave you a whole lot of things to talk about. You can feature your, your new menu, your signature items, your wines section on your wine list, a new cocktail, your new cocktail menu. You can feature your people, promote catering, your pdr, your philosophy. You can talk about your partners, meaning your farmers, the people you do business with. You can talk about some of your charity work, some of the work you do in the community, upcoming events, unique programming, wine tastings, all of that. There's plenty for you to talk about, I promise. Number seven, you gotta have a steady way to grow that list. I gave you a bunch of ways to grow that list. And then finally, number eight, I think you should be following a ton of other restaurants and get their emails so you can get inspiration and ideas. You don't have to come up with all the ideas on your own. You can watch what other people do. So that's it. That's what I wanted to talk about today. One final reminder. I talked about this in the beginning of the episode. If you want a free copy of my book, it's available now to the first 100 people who do this. I want you to go to the Instagram page, right? So estaurantstrategy and dm, the Word book. We will send you a link then for you to get the book totally for free. All you have to do is pay for shipping. This is only available. Apologies, this is only available to people in the United States, right? International shipping is a fortune. We looked into it. It's just, it makes no sense. We'll go broke trying to do it. But if you're in the United States, you don't have the book. If you want a copy of the book, we're giving it away. Absolutely. For free. But go to the Instagram page at restaurantstrategy and DM the Word Book. We will send you the link for you to grab a book. And the best part of it is that you'll also be granted a free 30 day membership to our Restaurant Foundations community. Right. So this has a monthly ask me anything session with me. It has a monthly master class, right, where we talk about a different subject every single month.
There are, there's an online course. You'll get access to an incredible resource bundle of templates, spreadsheets, cheat sheets, ebooks, all of that in there. You'll get all of that for free for a month when you grab this book. Again, the way to do that, go to the Instagram page at restaurantstrategy and DM the Word Book to get started. That link will be on the show. Notes. Thank you very much to all of you for making time in your week, for being with me every single week. I appreciate it. I will see you next time.
