You’ve just opened your restaurant and the physical location’s presence is making great rounds on social media and word-of-mouth marketing. However, the speed of converting customers is far too slow than what you wished can meet your target numbers and logistics. While paid social media posts create excellent awareness about your brand, you cannot create a brand following, identify, and cultivate your most-interested customers just by using Facebook or Instagram.
This is where having content comes in. Furthermore, your content is greatly useful only with an excellent strategy focused on email marketing. Here are eight effective ways you can achieve exceptional results from your campaigns.
Identify Your Different Types of Audiences
Before you start making content for your audience, it’s important to learn their vocabulary, interests, education, purchasing capability, and interest in your cuisine. Demographics is a great place to begin gathering knowledge about your customers.
Handing out electronic surveys through social media is a good starting point. However, you can also use post-meal surveys to see which of your dishes are highly selling.
Map Out Your Customer Journey
Here’s the typical customer’s journey. They start by finding your promotional content reposted by people in their social circles. With interest, they dive further into your social media content and find out about your best-sellers. In fact, they love your promotional videos and wondered if they can order from you. So, they head straight to your website and use your online ordering and delivery platform to order food from you.
It is from this point you can ask them to subscribe to your email newsletter if they would like to receive regular updates from your brand’s newest offers and promotions. The difference between email marketing and social media is you can direct the communication to a select number of audiences who have ventured deeply into your website.
For example, a customer who has ordered and subscribes to the newsletter (following the example above) is more receptive to the content they’ll receive. They’re more “active” than just your social media contact lit who are mostly “lurkers” waiting for the next promotion you might have. In doing so, you can create and handpick content based on your audience list. More on this below.
Handpick Content Based On Your Audiences
You can choose to write a blog on your website and talk about the “human” side of your business. For example, you can document and showcase the high quality of suppliers you work with when you source raw ingredients for your restaurant.
For typical businesses, blogs serve as informative posts about their recent activities or facility upgrades to their products. For F&B establishments, they can do the same. In addition, they can blog about the latest offers, projects, charities, and other activities they’ve accomplished too.
Update Your Blog Frequently
You don’t need to update your blog every single day. However, it’s necessary to have a new blog post per week. It could be about anything — the latest news on ingredients, helping suppliers get more local support from customers who cook their own food, and how your brand is helping raise awareness about a political or social topic.
It can be as simple as showing your staff cleaning the restaurant before it begins its work and the cleaning equipment, tools, and methods you use to ensure the sanitary preparation and storage of your food and ingredients. Just make sure it’s of interest to your customers to discuss this.
Create Custom Content For Major Audience Preferences
The best thing about email marketing is the ability to segregate your audiences into different content funnels. Now that you’ve identified their different customer journey stages, it’s easier to provide them with content you know they’ll most likely want to read.
One core aspect of email marketing is to distribute your content to those who greatly need it. With an understanding of your “warm” audiences’ prefefences, you can alert them to the right vouchers or promotions that aren’t introductory but more of value-adding such as bulk meal orders or “one-year free food” contests.
Schedule Your Emails Promptly
It’s important to determine the peak hours your customers will most likely view your emails. When it comes to food, sending emails a few hours before your target/majority audience’s break for lunch or dinner are optimal times. If you have new dishes or promotions, scheduling your emails during off-work hours and the weekend is a greatly viable strategy.
Automate Your Email Sending
Mailchimp, MailerLite, and other similar services offer free accounts especially if you’re just starting with a small crowd of subscribers. These platforms allow you to automate email sending going as far as scheduling them in months or even years. These allow you to automate the content for welcoming and converting customers — and even automate the entire conversion process too.
Always Keep Measuring Your Results
Lastly, your online delivery platform can only help you measure your business’ performance. Using specialised email platforms allow you to measure your email’s open and ignored rates. In doing so, you’ll see when to adjust your email’s content, whether your new implementation has worked, or your campaigns need a full overhaul.
Useful Emails Make Your Brand Shine Further
Email marketing isn’t just for the typical branding of huge businesses and brands. F&B establishments can benefit from it as well. By being present in your customers’ inboxes at the right time, they’ll want to open and take note of your brand’s promotions and even help spread it to their network too.
If you’re in need of an excellent online delivery platform, you’ve come to the right place. NinjaOS allows you to see the overall performance your deliveries and gives you the most accurate reports to help you grow your profits. If you’d like to learn more, drop us a line at sales@ninjaos.com today.
