Email Marketing Ideas For Local Restaurants

There are two steps to do Email marketing for any type of local business: the first one is list building and the second is to run email campaigns.

For local restaurant businesses, there are many ways of building your email list. Here are just some examples:

1. Include an email sign up on the comment card and bring them with the check to the clients in person when they finish the meal.

2. Insert a card promoting your email campaigns with your take-out and delivery orders. Simply put your site URL in it and tell people to go there to sign up for a special deal or something.

3. Sign people up for your email newsletter when they make the reservation. If you can have a reservation form on your site, it’ll be even better because people already become your email subscribers before they become your clients.

Now comes the email campaigns. What you should include in your email newsletters. Here are some ideas:

1. Menu. It could be your seasonal menu, menu change, or ingredients in your dishes;

2. Coupons. A small discount, exclusive to your email subscribers, will keep customers coming back;

3. Directions. Provide a link to driving routes, tips on parking, and public transportation information;

4. Gift cards. If you have them, speak it out. People are always looking for great gift ideas;

5. Pictures. Colorful pictures of food are the best enticement;

6. And don’t forget to mention your reservation phone number and best of all online reservation form.

For additional information on online marketing for local restaurant, please contact your local online marketing expert.

Dentist, Are You Ready For The Relationship Marketing?

The other day I received a mail newsletter from one of the local dental practices. It is the only newsletter I’ve ever received for the past couple of years. I was curious enough to go through every articles and news there. I would agree that they have done a great job, not only by delivering valuable information but by building its brands. Although it is costly to do that mail-out campaign, it is effective in building relationship between patience and its practice- just by that 2-page color printed newsletter.

As a matter of fact, dental patience tends to easily switch to new practice every time they see a coupon somewhere. While most of the dental practices have been aware of that, they fail to use various marketing ways to build the brand loyalty with their existing customers.

We are talking about relationship marketing more and more. Because to acquire new customers takes about 80% of the time, effort and money, but the revenue which generated is only 20% or less at the beginning. With the royalty relationship building up, we are going to generate more and more revenue.

There are some online relationship marketing tools other than those traditional ones. For example, email newsletters, coupon offers, rewards program, sweepstakes, etc. Stats show that over 90% of the people download or print coupon in the email; over 75% of people will purchase product offline because of the information he gathered from emails; over 70% of people will click the link to read company or brand content; and over 65% of people will share and forward the coupon in an email to their networking.

We also need to change the way of just thinking about coupon-based incentives to building brand loyalty based on more intangible, emotional values. Cone found that users developed positive feelings toward brands they felt they could interact with on new media channels. New media channels include videos, audios, photos, blogs, online social networks (i.e. twitter, facebook) and so on.

According to a survey conducted in September 2009, 74% of the respondents agreed that after interacting with companies or brands with new media, they generally have a more positive impression of the company or brand; and 70% of the respondents said that they are willing to engage with company or brand who has a presence in new media.

It is our goal as an online marketer to create on-going conversations with your new and existing customers to build brand royalty by various online relationship marketing tools.

How Deliverability is Like SEO and SEM for Email

What’s the word to better describe “Email deliverability”? – “Inbox placement rate” (IPR)

I think this better explains what marketers mean when they say “delivered” – because anywhere other than the inbox is not going to generate the kind of response that marketers need. The problem with the term “delivered” is that it is usually used to mean “didn’t bounce.” While that is a good metric to track, it does not tell you where the email lands. Inbox placement rate, by contrast, is pretty straightforward: how much of the email you sent landed in the inbox of our customers and prospects?

Now let’s come back to how achieving a high inbox placement rate is like search. If you run a web site, you certainly understand what SEO and SEM are, you care deeply about both, and you spend money on both to get them right. Whether “organic” or “paid,” you want your site to show up as high as possible on the page at Google, Yahoo, Bing, whatever. Both SEO and SEM drive success in your business, though in different ways.

The inbox is different and a far more fragmented place than search engines, but if you run an email program, you need to worry both about your “organic” inbox placement and your “paid” inbox placement. If you are prone to loving acronyms you could call them OIP and PIP.

What’s the difference between the two?

With organic inbox placement, you are using technology and analytics to manage your email reputation, the underpinning of deliverability. You are testing, tracking, and monitoring your outbound email. Seeing where it lands – in the inbox, in the junk mail folder, or nowhere? You are doing all this to optimize your inbox placement rate (IPR) — just as you work to optimize your page rank on search engines. One of the ways you do this is by monitoring your email reputation (Sender Score) as a proxy for how likely you are to have your email filtered or blocked. The more you manage all of these factors, the greater likelihood you will be placed in inboxes everywhere.

With paid inbox placement, you first have to qualify by having a strong email reputation. Then you use payment to ensure inbox placement, and frequently other benefits like functioning images and links or access to rich media. With this paid model, there’s no guarantee to inbox placement (don’t let anyone tell you otherwise), just like there’s no guarantee that you’ll be in the #1 position via paid search if someone outbids you. But by paying, you are radically increasing the odds of inbox placement as well as adding other benefits. There is one critical difference from search here, which is that you need good organic inbox placement in order to gain access to PIP. You can’t just pay to play.

Email Marketing Open and Click Through Rate

MailerMailer stats shows that, unique email marketing gets averagely 12.5% open rate in the second half of 2008, which is 0.68% lower than first half of 2008, and 1.46% lower than year 2007.

Statistics shows that how often e-mails were opened and clicked varied with the industry of the sender—and the size of the list.

Messages delivered to small and medium lists had higher open and click-through rates than messages delivered to lists of 1,000 or more subscribers.

Religious and spiritual organizations had the highest open rates among large lists, followed by telecommunications and travel companies.

Here is the chart showing email open rate for most industries worldwide:

Click-through rates is even lower, for list of over 1000 subscribers, click-through rate is averagely 3.5%.

What’s your email campaign open rate and click-through rate? If you are getting similar or higher rate than what above stats shows, congratulations! Your email marketing is successful.

If not, you’d better thinking about how to improve your email open rate and click-through rate. Or most of the time, you are totally unaware of them. Then you definitely need some marketing expert to help you out. Otherwise you are losing sales everyday without noticing it!