Email marketing gives businesses a handy means to share news, announce new products, send promotions, newsletters, and overall be in touch with prospects and customers. In 2020, brands earned $36 for each dollar spent on average with email marketing, worldwide. Email marketing was and still remains a channel with one of the highest returns on investment.
Here are some of the latest statistics on email in the restaurant industry:
The goal comes first and is usually defined by your business objective. The next steps will depend on how the goal is formulated.
When deciding on a goal, avoid vague, approximating words. It should be phrased in a clear and understandable way, leave no room for interpretation, and make it easy to measure the progress.
There can be one or multiple goals. Here is an example of one that aims to improve earnings during a restaurant’s slow season:
Earn $1,500 in revenue daily during the downtime in December-February.
This higher-level goal can then be split into subgoals or milestones, like these:
After you’ve decided on your goal, it’s time to build an email list.
Here are some of the best, restaurant-specific email marketing strategies to do it:
As you begin to accumulate email addresses, start splitting them into groups.
Email segmentation is about dividing an email list into smaller groups of people, based on criteria like interests, nationality, marital status, or others.
Next comes writing email texts and designing their look. Make it simple with this workflow:
The outline will let you know what and in which order you should write. Make sure it has all the topics you want to include: the topic of the email in question, a section with a discount on special days, maybe a section with announcements, etc.
There are a few points to remember about writing the email copy:
Putting together the design is the last and easiest part. Most email marketing platforms have templates you could use for this.
A few things to remember when designing an email:
Once you’ve created the emails, it’s time to set them up and automate them.
Automated emails are also called triggered emails or behavioral-driven emails — they get sent to your subscribers based on actions they took or did not take, or conditions set up beforehand (i.e., customer’s birthday), without you having to do anything.
Some of the benefits of email automation:
The results of the four earlier steps need to be measured — that is where analytics comes in.
Email marketing analytics is a method to track how your subscribers interact with your emails by measuring and interpreting relevant metrics. Depending on your goal, you’ll need to measure different things, which means different KPIs.
Aside from goal-specific KPIs, there are also a few universal metrics. Anyone doing email marketing needs to pay attention to these:
Next, you’ll need goal-specific KPIs to know if you are making progress:
There are multiple ideas and approaches that work well for a restaurant’s email marketing.
When someone signs up for the newsletter or becomes a member of a loyalty program, they usually get a welcome email. Its main point is to thank the person for joining and give them the key information regarding their sign-up.
These could be emails with gift cards, discounts, or simple congratulations from the restaurant’s owner about special events like a birthday, engagement or marriage anniversary.
Attract new customers by hosting and promoting events. The grander they are, the more thought you should put into the planning of your email campaign.
Examples:
Highlight new menu items, changes to old items, chef’s specials, and remind about meals that are popular among visitors. When crafting such emails, use storytelling in email marketing.
Examples:
Special offers can bring in more guests and boost your revenue up during slow days.
Examples:
A review and feedback request email should go to people who’ve been to your restaurant within the last 24 hours. You can choose a different time frame, but 24 hours after a visit is usually a good choice for this type of email.
When choosing an email marketing service, consider the following:
How to calculate the volume: approximate how much transactional emails and marketing emails you’ll send within a month, then sum them up together.
For transactional emails, consider:
For marketing emails, consider this:
Let’s take a look at some of the popular email marketing service providers that would be a good fit for a restaurant and how they stack up against each other.
Selzy is an easy-to-use email marketing service for small and medium-sized businesses.
Selzy covers all of the important features: mobile optimization, email templates, visual drag-and-drop email builder, email personalization, analytics, and segmentation. It allows you to set up website pop-ups and subscription forms, set up automated and drip campaigns, and do A/B testing.
You can easily integrate Selzy with Joomla, AmoCRM, Magenta, PrestaShop, and other services.
Their free plan allows users to send up to 1,500 emails to an email list of up to 100 contacts, and it comes with all the main features except segmentation and A/B testing. Past that, Selzy lets you choose between paid plans (starting at $7 a month) based on your contact list size, or flexible pay-as-you-go plans based on the number of emails sent, without any fixed monthly or annual payments. Try Selzy for free.
Mailchimp is one of the most popular services that has been around since 2001 and earned plenty of reviews and positive ratings over the years. It’s actually not an email marketing provider but an all-in-one marketing platform for small businesses — it also offers website and commerce-related plans alongside email marketing.
It comes with mobile optimization, an easy-to-use drag-and-drop email builder, templates, basic reports, and analytics. Mailchimp also offers subscription forms and landing pages, segmentation, automatic campaigns, and A/B testing.
The platform easily integrates with Stripe, Yelp for Business, LiveChat, WordPress, Facebook, SurveyMonkey, and many other apps.
Their free plan allows users to send up to 2,500 emails per month to an email list of up to 500 contacts, but only basic features are available there. Paid plans start at $13 a month. They have a pay-as-you-go option as well.
GetResponse offers small businesses a suite of marketing tools, among which there is a fully equipped email marketing service. It also has awesome e-commerce tools and integrations that would be useful to restaurants with a lot of takeouts. This is an email marketing platform that will reduce your dependence on Deliveroo or Uber Eats, and help you save on their expensive fees.
GetResponse comes with a drag-and-drop email builder, templates, segmentation, subscription forms, website and landing pages, automation, and a number of other features.
There are 100+ integrations available, among them — Shopify, OptinMonster, Facebook Lead Ads, Magento, Google Contacts, FreshBooks, PayPal, and others.
GetResponse does not have a free plan, but they do have a free 30-day trial. Their cheapest paid plan after that starts at around $14.26 a month and has most of the important features, including automation and segmentation options.
The email campaign by Cheesecake Factory promotes celebrating St.Patric’s day at their place — and does so by tempting the reader with their menu. They enhance the message with a discount that has a time limit.
Cheesecake Factory also addresses possible concerns about COVID-19 by describing its air filtration system. They use a simple design that alternates between custom images and text with a CTA on a clean light pink background. The section about COVID-19 uses a completely different style and sticks out in the email — which is good for attracting attention but does not match the design overall.
Arby’s email campaign offers a small lemonade for $1 — and they have three flavors to choose from. It’s simple, straightforward, and easy to remember — and a good deal for a drink made of real fruits.
Arby’s email design features the growing trend of isolating individual images of products. The glasses with drinks and a burger with french fries put there by themselves create an online shopping feel. The alternation of green and white background (other than the header image) with isolated images of drinks and food focuses the reader’s attention on them — and on the CTA buttons.
Cracker Barrel uses Christmas celebration habits to promote their holiday meal sets. They know that cooking for Christmas takes a lot of work and time — and suggest to their subscribers to spend that time on getting along with their family (and the food can come from Cracker Barrel instead).
The email’s design uses blank spaces, divider lines, and subheads to segregate the content into distinct sections that make it comfortable to read and easy to skim through. An easy-to-use, accessible email design is one of the trends in 2023 — and Cracker Barrel has already adopted it.
Together with the matching fonts, this design makes the email distinct and matches perfectly with the company’s branding.
It’s winter and it’s cold outside, but Dishpatch got you covered with their cozy and tasty dishes. Their email campaign displays high-resolution photos of four tempting meals with just their names — as the proverb goes, “Better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times”.
Dishpatch email design uses the same pale pink background as their website does, with similar vivid, lifelike custom images. Customized imagery is a way to go if you want your design to feel exclusive and up-to-date. Other than images, Dishpatch’s email has a simple structure and is easy to read and scroll through — a widespread trend in 2023.
Sweetgreen’s email campaign introduces new menu items and they got rid of distractions to achieve maximum effect. Vivid pictures with a short description on a clean white background focus the reader’s attention, while two CTA buttons — at the start and at the end of the email — make sure the reader does not need to scroll.
The simple and clean design of this email uses different shades of navy blue for subheaders, text, CTAs, and even as a background for the images. The color scheme is very close to their website’s design — they made sure to be consistent so that their customers can associate the email with Sweetgreen right away. In addition, a clean email setup makes the realistic and detailed photos of the dishes they promote stand out more.
Starbucks campaign is a great example of combining at least two out of the marketing ideas listed above:
Starbucks hosted Pop-Up Parties in select cities across the U.S., and offered free tall handcrafted espresso beverages from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. local time.
The email campaign promotes both the party and the special offer. Revealing a new location every day instead of just publicizing them all at once added to the intrigue and made the whole thing more fun and exciting for their customers.
Starbucks went for a very simple email structure — it only has a custom header image and a short text that gets straight to the point, plus a CTA. All of it — in their brand colors.
Email marketing for restaurants works whether it’s a dine-in, take-out, drive-by, drive-in, delivery, or even food truck-only. There are plenty of great email marketing ideas you can try.
