Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, check it out. Email continues to be the preferred mode of communication between consumers and the brands they support. So you are a brand. You have consumers, right? You have a restaurant, and your diners are your consumers. They want to hear from you, and the way they most want to hear from you is through email marketing. So I speak to a lot of very smart people and the biggest restaurant groups and chains out there use list growth as their number one marketing metric to follow. So how do you grow your list? That's what we're going to talk about on today's episode of Restaurant Strategy. 8 Ways to Grow your email list.
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 foreign.
Thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. This is Restaurant Strategy podcast dedicated to helping you build a more profitable restaurant. Each week we've got two episodes, Operations on Mondays, marketing on Thursdays. All helping you level up and build a more profitable and sustainable business. I also work directly with owners and operators all over the country through my P3 mastermind program. This is a group coaching format geared towards helping you increase the profitability of your restaurant. So if that's something you want to focus on in the year ahead, then I want you to get in touch, have a conversation with me or someone from my team. There's absolutely no pressure to join, but just learn what we are doing. You do that by going to restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule grab some time on the calendar. We'll get to ask some questions of you. You'll get to ask a bunch of questions of us so that we can see if it's a good fit. If it's a good fit, we'll talk about next steps again. RestaurantStrategyPodcast.com Schedule as always, that link is in the show notes.
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Not just the size of your list, but net new subscribers. How many new subscribers are you adding every single month? That single metric is what some of the smartest restaurant marketers I know are tracking. And so let's talk about it. Let's talk about ways to grow your list. We talk a lot about how to nurture your list and why a list is important. Today we're cutting right to the chase. Here are eight ways you can grow your list. Number one, most important way is through your reservation system, right? So if you work with Open table or Talk or Resy or seven Rooms or Yelp or any of the table management or reservations software platforms, you are collecting data. You are getting names, emails and phone numbers. That is valuable, valuable data. And also if you're doing wait list, right? If you're the kind of place that doesn't take reservations, you should be taking advantage of the waitlist capabilities, right? So that you are not just getting a name and putting it on a clipboard and then calling out, Susan, Susan, party of four, your table's ready. Susan. It's a waste. Capture their name, their email and their phone number and tell them, say, we'll text you and your table's ready, right? That's how you do it. You say, I'm going to text you when your table's ready and you got their phone number. You should also have their email list, your email address as well. So your reservation software, your table management software is one key way that you can be capturing data, right? Number two, if you do online orders on your website, you are capturing data. The key then is to take those reservation, the data from the reservation system and the data from the online ordering platform and to dump them into your email service provider. Now, maybe you got everything under the hood. You're using whatever marketing suite your, your POS provides or your website platform provides. Fine. Or maybe you're using something on the side like a mailchimp or a constant contact. Fine. You need a way to constantly be dumping those, those new contacts into your CRM, your customer relations management software, like mailchimp, right? So your reservations platform, that's one key way. Your online ordering platform, that's another key way. The third loyalty, right? If you have a loyalty program Right. Maybe you say hey at the end when you drop the check, say hey, would you like to join our loyalty program? You get an automatic hundred points just for signing up, Something like that. They say yes. You get their name, their email and their phone number. It's a one important way. Jury's still out. You can work hard to try to convince me that loyalty actually makes more loyal customers. But for me, I love loyalty for the single reason. If for nothing else, then it helps you collect customer data. So your reservation platform, your online order platform, and your loyalty platform, those are three key ways. The fourth way, this is so simple, is gated WI fi. If you offer free WI fi to the guests in your dining room, I strongly urge you to gate that WI fi. There are platforms like Viva Spot, right? Viva V I V A Spot S P O T. Look it up. It's like 19 bucks a month. And basically it just collects their name and their email, or their name, email, phone number. And then you can access WI fi for free. So in essence, WI fi is not for free. It will cost you your data, right? Your information. And the key to that, what becomes really powerful about that is that all the other ways that you're capturing, you know that you're capturing data. These four ways, right? Reservations, online orders, loyalty, and gated WI fi. You know, all of these people are customers. They know your product. They have been to you. And that's incredibly powerful. That's powerful because all the next ones that I'm going to share are for people who are prospective diners. But these four are most crucial because they already know you. They found you, they trust you. Hopefully they had a meal and they loved what you are. So those are the first four ways to capture data.
Now, Sterling Douglas is the co founder and CEO of a company called Chowley. Chowley does so much for this industry. And I want you to hear a little bit from Sterling.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: In the last few years, restaurants have faced massive changes. Labor costs, food costs, rent, even payment processing costs are up so much that price increases alone can't cover it. And at the same time, their customers are demanding a whole new way to interact digitally. And that's now a requirement to survive, let alone thrive. To their credit, restaurant operators have been resilient. They've survived pandemics, inflation, regulatory environments and more. They've added the tablets, put out the QR codes, took reviews seriously, and their reward? A disjointed collection of tech that doesn't talk to each other and is impossible to manage. I've listened to hundreds of operators tell me the same story with the same problems. And that's why we came out with the Chale platform. One place to manage everything outside of your four walls. Just like everything built at Chale for our 17,000 restaurants, integrations and connections are at the heart of everything we do. It starts with your digital storefront. Your website has two jobs, more traffic, more orders. By connecting to Google Business Profile and your point of sale, we get that done for you. Digital marketing. We'll manage your paid ads, emails and social posts. We'll help you win the hyperlocal knife fight to maximize your sales. We measure everything so you know exactly where your orders are coming from. Marketplace, email website ads app all in one place CH gives you more orders by ensuring your entire digital storefront is optimized with the data you already have more time by using our knowledge in a done for you experience and more control by managing it all in one place. The Channel platform isn't just a tool, it's a partner in running a more successful and profitable restaurant.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: If you want to learn more about Chowley, go find the link in the show notes.
Now we're talking about ways to capture email addresses, right? List growth net new subscribers every month. Understanding how many new email addresses you add to your list every month is one key metric and what some of the most, the smartest, most accomplished restaurant marketers out there are using. That's their key KPI, right? Their main KPI for measuring the success of their marketing efforts. Again, the first four, your reservation platform, your online ordering platform, your loyalty platform and gating your wifi, right? So if you give it away for free, just charge an email address to access the wi fi. Now those are all existing customers. Those are all people who know your product, who came to you, who enjoyed your meal. The next four, the last four are really prospective diners, but no less important, right? Number one, on your website, it should be in the footer of your website so that on every single page there is a capture form there for people to join your list. Number five, there should be a pop up on your website. Now maybe you use that pop up feature to promote different events or big, you know, big holidays that you have coming up. Fine, but you promote Thanksgiving and then you promote Christmas and then you promote New Year's and then there's a little while before you start promoting Valentine's Day. So swap out and make it so the footer is an email capture, right? So that everybody lands on the website, there's a pop up prompting them to join your list and then you promote Valentine's Day for a little bit and then you got nothing to promote until let's say Easter or Mother's Day. You swap back in the pop up trying to capture email addresses, right? So number five and number six, footers and pop ups on your website. Number seven. I always talk about like charity events, community events, things like that. I always want to run a contest. So when you do like a street fair, let's say, right, and the idea is to just sell a lot of product, right? That's not the main idea. The main point of a community event, like a street fair, a craft fair, you know, something like that. The main point is to introduce yourself to thousands and thousands of people who otherwise didn't know you were there, don't know who you are. Yes, I hope you sell your product. But more important is to capture data. What I do, I do the fishbowl, the Fishbowl playbook, right? So I would be selling my tacos, right? So okay, I got a taco place, I'm selling tacos and you know, bottles of Harrietos and it's great. I would have a big fishbowl and say, enter to win a $100 gift card, right? At the end of the day we are giving away, we're picking names out of the hat and giving away 5, 100 gift cards, right? So you collect data all day or you can do this digitally too. You can have people scan a QR code, same thing, right? It's the Fishbowl playbook. You're getting people to write down their name, their phone and their email address, or put in their business card, or scan and fill out, you know, scan a QR code and fill it out digitally. Same idea. You're capturing data, capturing data, capturing data. And at the end of the day you reach out to the five winners and say, congratulations, you're a winner of a hundred dollar gift card. We have it waiting for you at the restaurant. And this is really important. If you can make them come down to the restaurant, right? That will help. Come down to the restaurant, they get their gift card. Hopefully they spend their gift card right then and there, right? The other thing you do then, right here's really crucial. You say, you know, you say send an email to the other 300 people who might have put their information in the, in the fishbowl. And you say, hey, you didn't win, but you're still a winner. And that phrasing is really important. You didn't win, but you're still a winner. Even Though you didn't win one of our hundred dollar gift cards, we're giving everybody who entered a $10 gift card to use when you come by simply this email. On your next visit, click here to place your order. Click here to, you know, book a reservation. Whatever it is, right? Whatever's appropriate for your restaurant, right? That's the number seventh way that when you run a community event, charity event, you know you are at a street fair or whatever. Yes, sell product. I hope you sell product. But you have to make a commotion. You gotta get people to sign up and give away something juicy, man. Like if you can give away like a computer or something, right? We're giving away $500 gift cards and a grand prize of a new MacBook. Whatever it is, anything to get people to put their stuff in there, I promise you it will reap dividends and your ability. Then email the winners. Email the quote unquote losers will drive more business. You will make all that money. The last thing I want to recommend number eight is Nift. I was really recently introduced to some of the folks over there. Nift is an incredibly powerful tool to utilize. I'm going to try to explain it. All I can say is that it works. You might have already received a Nift gift card from, from, you know, from your online shopping or whatever, but this thing works. You can partner with them and it's a great way to capture email addresses nift and go look them up. I'll put the website in the show notes. That's it. The eight ways that you should be leveraging, the eight tools you should be leveraging to grow your email list. Number one, your reservation platform. Number two, your online ordering platform. Number three, your loyalty platform. Number four, you should gate your WI fi. Number five, your website footer in your website. Number six, the pop up on your website. Number seven, make sure you're using these community events, charity events, street fairs, that you're using them properly. And finally, number eight, look into a company called Nift. They are incredibly powerful. It works. The lifetime value of the customers you will get through Nift is much higher than the average customer just coming in off the street. That's it, guys. Net new subscribers. The amount of new people you add to your list every single week, that is key. As always, appreciate you guys being here. Hope this helps. I will see you next time.
