More Sales with Newsletters
“Newsletters remind customers about your business”
The harsh truth is that no-one cares about your business as much as you do! The same truth also applies to most of your customers, so constant touch points is the best and cheapest strategy to be front of mind.
Menu drops and social media work as well, but newsletters are incredibly effective and incredibly cheap. It just takes a small amount of effort to send out newsletters that remind customers about your business.
Getting Started
Well, you cannot send newsletters without email addresses. In my restaurant, we had five main ways of collecting email addresses.
- Sign-up form in your restaurant - You also need to encourage people to sign-up by offering entry into a monthly draw for a prize (i.e. $50 voucher). Pro tip: Ask for their birthday so you can send automated birthday cards.
- Facebook Sign-up Form - Most of the good email newsletter programs provide a Facebook integration. We used MailChimp that has this feature and got away with using the free edition.
- Website sign-up - As above, pretty much every email provider will have a sign-up form integration for your existing website or will have a feature that allows you to paste the sign-up form code in the back end of your site.
- Online Ordering - One of the great benefits of running your own online ordering systems (other than not paying commission) is that you get a copy of all your customer data. From here you can invite them to join your competition newsletter, as long as your terms and conditions provide for this.
- Asking for it - The simplest methods are often the best, why not ask happy customers if they would like to sign-up for the newsletter competition.
If you have any questions or would like to know more, please feel free to ask us or drop a comment and we will be happy to extend the blog post.