5 Tips to master email marketing for the food industry
Are you a restaurant eyeing a grand comeback post-pandemic? If yes, emails can be your lucky charm as it’s the most lucrative online marketing channel in terms of ROI (4400%) and impact. We have been confined to our homes for a long time, and as vaccination drives accelerate, people will start exploring cuisines with even greater enthusiasm, and you wouldn’t want to leave such an opportunity. Emails come in handy in the process as most restaurants would already be using them. As an email marketing specialist, I often get suggestions to share my tips on the subject and thus, I came up with five tips that you need to master right away as a food industry-based email marketer. Let’s get started.
#1 Focus On List Building As A Core Part Of All Touchpoints With Your Customers
The first piece of advice I would like to give all food industry marketers as an email marketing specialist is interweaving list building across all customer touchpoints. This includes your customers from walk-in, take away, and online ordering channels along with your social media followers. Generally, freebie or discount offers, contests, and rewards against email addresses work well for the food industry.
As the economies reopen, the competition is going to be fierce as almost every restaurant struggled through the long stay-at-home orders. Emails can prove to be a great asset due to them being the most reliable and profitable digital marketing channel that also allows consent-based, one-on-one personalized outreach. Therefore, leave no stone unturned in capturing new email subscribers and also try winning the old ones back.
#2 Capitalize On The Combination Of Exclusivity And Personalization
Personalization is about catering to fluid user experience as it keeps your messages relevant to the subscribers despite the change in their preferences. When personalizing your emails, you should always keep in mind that email communication with a subscriber should resemble speaking to them in person at your outlet. But the secret to making personalization 10x more effective is adding an element of exclusivity.
While exclusivity takes personalization a step further, it is about giving special access to your subscribers to promotional offers and special discounts. Remember, these offers should be provided around weekends or festivities and their personal occasions because that’s where most of the spending occurs. Entertain them with interesting content of their personal interest by collecting data of individual subscribers and sending them tailored promotional emails that regularly revolve around their favorite concepts.
#3 Focus More On Dynamic Segmentation
Over a while, interest and taste change for everyone, so it is important to use real-time data to continuously update marketing segments with new information as it comes in. That’s what dynamic segmentation does for you.
Proper dynamic segmentation is one of the best marketing strategies for restaurants. Start segmenting your contacts even based on their friends’ and other tablemates’ preferences. As you engage more with them on a collective basis, you’ll be able to fill more and more fields to build a good customer profile.
Powerful marketing automation technology plays an important role here as you need to customize your messages for a group of people regarding their evolving preferences, spending capacity, affinities, and how they behave as a group.
#4 Leverage User-Generated Content
Customer appreciation emails are the emails you send to reward your restaurant’s loyal customers and to make them understand that you appreciate them for supporting you in your business. When you show gratitude for having your email subscribers, it will strengthen your customer relationships and catalyze their loyalty towards your restaurant. Your main motive is to get your customers back to your restaurant again and again.
Hold photo contests oriented towards your food business where the one with the most likes wins. Ask for their opinions, best review videos, travelogue posts, and even blogs. Here, the idea is to engage people with your brands and communicate regarding the same in a series of emails. This increases your engagement rates while giving you the much-needed exposure in their inner circle.
#5 Include Referrals In Your Campaign Strategy
One of the most effective forms of email marketing in the food industry are referral programs. Not only do they keep your existing subscribers engaged, but they also motivate them to help you guys to acquire more customers, keeping your growth going. It always makes sense to thank your subscribers for helping your business to attract new customers. Giving financial rewards is a great way to reciprocate. However, I find it’s necessary to make it a two-way offer where both the referrer and referred person get rewarded.
FOMO (fear of missing out) is a great way to increase referrals for the food industry. You can use timers, date and time-specific deadlines to reinstate the offer with limited access to perks. But you need to keep in mind that your referral email marketing campaigns should be designed to attract recurring customers, not one-timers.
Summing Up
Toward the end, I would like to stress explicitly disclosing all terms and conditions upfront in a clearly visible area of the email template. Always keep your word and plan your campaigns to build a steady pipeline of new subscribers while catering to the existing customer base.
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