Marketing Restaurant Online

How can a personalised email with video integrated can give a life to the communication and take the customer relationship to the next level?

Yesterday I received an email about President Barack Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress.  Though I know it was sent by one of his email campaign manager, it is still a personalised email sent to Nash and that is me. It doesn’t start with “Dear All” and starts with my name and I feel that I was appreciated as a human being by a president in his email communication. Though as a marketer I understand that it was automated, I feel it is better than mass media communication because it gives a control of the message to the recipient. What I mean by that is that though I didn’t get a chance to watch the live TV address by president Obama, the recorded version was sent to me via email. On the next day while I was driving back from work, I had a plenty of time to watch and listen while driving. So the point here is that due to the email communication, I was able to have a control over when to consume the content. I took out my iPhone and linked to the email and watched the clips of president’s address on YouTube.  I felt that with this email communication,  I felt the communication via email was personalised to my lifestyle demands and challenges. It didn’t force me to stick to the television to get the information. Mass media like TV didn’t have a control over my time and my lifestyle. Rather I had control over the choice of media and the time when to watch with the power of internet, YouTube, iPhone and of course the valuable communication tool-email.

Restaurants can also use similar strategies. You can load the message in your email account like aweber or icontact email service provider. You can also load the videos and personalise the email by giving a life to the communication. Now your customer have a chance to see you in person even if you never happen to be in the restaurant. In most cases, the restaurant owners are so busy, they don’t have much time to say hello to all their customers. In this case, taking advantage of internet technology why not reach all your customers by uploading a personalised thank you video and sending to all your customers. At least your customers would appreciate that you took your time to thank them in person though it is virtually.  This is just a simple example and there are so many other thing you can do with video integrated into your email communication that would take your relationship with customers to the next level.

During the early days of email it was plagued with spams. It was out of control. Till today, email marketing is affected by spams. It has given a bad name to the email marketing. Since then people are scared to give their email address to any company without building a good relationship. Some of the restaurants and many other small businesses have tried email marketing. Some of them succeed and most of them fail. The reason is that they fail to use it properly and effectively. In a simpler term, email is like a loaded gun. If you use it well, you will be able to shoot your target very well and get the reward. On the other hand, if you don’t know how to load the gun and fire the weapon properly, there is a chance that you will shoot yourself. It is same with the email marketing. If you use permission based email marketing then you will gain far more customers than by trying to spam. I don’t recommend spamming. It is like taking a shortcut to achieve your goals. It doesn’t work that way.

So the question is how can we make our email marketing more effective that works?

The answer to that is by providing valuable content to the customers. Just for an example, if you are an Italian restaurant, you can create a monthly newsletter and talk about the new pastas health benefits. You have to be informative rather than trying to sell the stuff. You could write articles like “7 tips how Italian pasta can help you from high blood pressure” just for an example. Now in the newsletter you are going with the mindset of teaching rather than selling. I call this selling by informing.  Now with this equation, customers would be eager to receive the newsletter because there is some valuable information that is helful in their life.

Therefore I still believe that email  is still one of the effective communication tool available for restaurant marketing.