Restaurant marketing emails outperform other sectors: Top 4 tips for success

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Restaurant marketing emails outperform other sectors: Top 4 tips for success

In the just-released 2010 edition of Sign-Up.to’s email marketing benchmark report restaurants saw one of the biggest improvements in engagement with their email marketing campaigns.

The average open rate for restaurant marketing emails in the first half of 2010 was 25.5% with a click-through rate of 6.14% – both figures were well above the all-sector averages of 17.98% and 3.56% respectively.

Being the inquisitive type, I dug into the results further to see what could be learned from these impressive results and I’ve distilled these into 4 tips that you can easily apply to boost your email marketing results:

1) Genuine offers get outstanding results – we’ve seen a big increase in value-led promotions from our restaurant clients, not surprising in the current economic climate, but the results of these are.

Restaurants who ran offer-based campaigns with strong propositions (buy 1 get 1 free, dine for £x etc.) and well designed campaigns regularly saw open rates exceed 33% and downloads of the vouchers top 11% of all recipients – the redemption rates were equally high, giving a phenomenal return on investment.

It’s important to note that only strong offers met with success – weak promotions often lead to a decline in response rates which carried over into subsequent campaigns, so be as compelling as possible.

2) Amplify results by using all of your marketing channels together – the campaigns that got the best results used email marketing, Twitter and Facebook in combination to make it easy for people to spread the message. This included using links in the email campaign to make it easy to repost on social networks and also pushing out the campaign itself on Facebook and Twitter and allowing users of these networks to register in order to receive the deal.

3) Make sure you gather data – this is key to making a long term success of your campaigns, rather than just having a one-hit-wonder. If you’re offering a great deal then ask people to register and consent to receiving future offers from you in order to receive it. Start with basic information like name and email address to keep the process simple. If your offer is good then you’ll see massive growth in your subscribers numbers in no time as people pass the offer around.

4) Test, test, test – your business is unique and so is your audience, so the best way to find out what will get you the best return is to test different propositions – this could be different offers or simply different wording of the same offer (even saying ‘half price’ instead of ‘50% off’ can have a significant impact on your results). Split-testing email campaigns is a great way to do this quickly and efficiently, you can then apply the results to your other online and offline marketing.

If you’d like to find out more about how you can use email marketing to boost your sales you can get in touch with Sign-Up.to at solutions@sign-up.to

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Article provided by Livebookings – home of freshly prepared restaurant marketing ideas

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