When it comes to promoting your restaurant and garnering customer attention, email marketing is just as important as social media and optimizing SEO. The best campaigns use sales data to hone in on what your guests want. By personalizing the message, you strengthen customer relationships and improve retention rates in the long-term.
How can you create effective email marketing? It starts with convincing them to open the message at all.
The Importance of Subject Lines
Nearly half of email recipients decide whether to read it based on the subject line alone. A compelling call-to-action can significantly raise your open rate, so spend time coming up with something that lands nicely.
The ideal subject line is six to ten words long and never more than twelve, although a themed, one-word subject can be just as compelling. Further, personalize your email marketing by including the recipient’s name. There are algorithms that auto-fill names for mass marketing campaigns so you don’t have to send everyone an individual email, which is very time-consuming.
Your subject line should be meaningful and to the point. People skim marketing emails and will skip right over anything that doesn’t immediately catch their eye. Watch the sentence length as well. On the desktop, subject lines cut off after about sixty characters; mobile-only shows half that. In this digital age, online ordering via smartphone is enjoying a rise in popularity, so make sure it’s readable to everyone.
Tricks for Email Marketing
Now you know what to avoid. However, it would help if you also took your current strategy to the next level and actively increase your open rates with a few tricks to keep customers subscribed and engaged.
Put the most important words first. Don’t squander their attention on filler; it should immediately catch the eye to encourage the most readership.
Avoid writing in all-caps, as that can come off as off-putting and aggressive.
Ask a question to compel them to open it and find the answer.
Get specific about the content inside the newsletter, so they know that what they’re about to read is relevant to their interests.
Make customers feel important with exclusive deals and early access to sales.
Use deadlines like, “Come visit before the long weekend is over!” to portray urgency.
You want to show customers that they’re getting something special by signing up with you. Whether that’s by forging personal connections or giving out offers exclusive to the people on your contact list, email marketing is where you show what you do better than the competition. Include a call-to-action at the end of your newsletters to encourage customers to check out your social media, order from your website or engage with you some other way.
Good email marketing starts with a smart subject line opened by the right people. Advanced Point of Sale systems securely saves customer data so you can build better ad campaigns. Schedule a demo with eatOS to learn how we’re ushering in the future of food service, today.
