What is Your Email Saying? Let’s Talk Content!

In the early days of e-mail marketing, circa 1997, the buzzword was"newsletter".

Sending a monthly newsletter was all the rage. As time progressed, I discovered that the priorities and circumstances of restaurant owners left little time to construct a monthly newsletter. Coming up with content to send and typing it out and formatting it all perfectly was just too much for them to handle on a consistent basis. Since consistency is the overall key to success, email newsletters usually didn’t last and were thrown out with the bath water.

At Spillover, we've changed the nomenclature and don’t ever use the term newsletter. We have eradicated it from our vocabulary, and now we use the phrase, event notification or the term email invitation, which also works quite well. After all, you’re inevitably inviting your customer to come back to your restaurant. These terms stuck and we’ve used them ever since.

When you use the term invitation, it sets the tone for what should be sent. You want to invite your customer to have an experience. Maybe it's a new bottle of wine that you've added to the list. Perhaps that wine is paired perfectly with a prime piece of steak. A beautiful photo, a short narrative about the wine and steak would be a provocative campaign, and it wouldn’t take you long at all to pull together. Sounds like a lovely invitation!

It could be that you’re having an "all-you-can-eat night." Perhaps you are adding a seasonal dish to the menu. Perhaps there is a holiday coming up; Valentine's Day, Mother's Day or Easter Sunday and you’re inviting your customer to be with you. Maybe it's the big sports event this Saturday or Friday night.

Whatever the reason, it's important to communicate clearly and distinctly without sending a long page of 50 different events for the whole month. You can very easily provide too much information and thereby dilute all of your upcoming events, leaving all of them lacking participation. Don't dilute the focus. Once a month to once every other month pick out an event that is worth gearing up for and really push that one event. We have found this to be most effective.

Emailing Discounts

Over the years at Spillover, we have discovered that the e-mail discount can be quite an effective tool for bringing traffic in the front door. We've also discovered that many of our clients have questions regarding e-mail discounts. I'll attempt to answer some of those questions here.

The question I hear the most is,"How do I keep someone from printing out my email offer 500 times and handing them out on the street corner?" or something to that effect. My answer is this,"If you provide an offer so good that someone would want to print them off and hand them out on the street corner, then congratulations! You don't have to pay somebody to advertise for you!"

The logical answer is don't provide a discount that is going to break the bank if everyone and their dog uses it. Be smart about it. Count your costs and tally your profits before the campaign.

As far as comps go, we have found that the most successful comp is a free dessert, drink, or appetizer. I mentioned these before but it’s worth saying again: be sure to put disclaimers and parameters on the voucher itself. We recommend placing the following lines very small at the bottom of the voucher:

"Dine in only. Served only with a purchased entree. Limit one per table. Expires XX/XX/XXXX"

With Spillover's Email Marketing Solution, our software can print customer variables right on the voucher. We could print an email address on every voucher. We could, provided that we have this information, print the person's name directly on the voucher. You could cross-reference the name with a list of the current customers in your database.

Call Spillover today and let's help you implement an email marketing solution that works. Spillover does all the work for you, including a 52-week marketing plan. You can reach an account manager today, so call us. Our number is 512-435-4840. We look forward to hearing from you.

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