Email Marketing
How often do you check your emails? Once a day? Twice? Every time you look at your phone? In today’s digital world, your customers refresh their inboxes 24/7, providing you with a consistent and personalised way to communicate and connect with them. Yet, email marketing is still frequently seen as the poor relation in today’s world of social media, despite its ability to improve brand recall and affinity, and subsequently increase conversions.
However, it is becoming increasingly difficult for restaurants to reach customers through digital channels. Changes in algorithms mean that social media isn’t as straightforward as it used to be. That said, this doesn’t mean social media is going anywhere soon, and it certainly shouldn’t be overlooked in your marketing strategy.
But when was the last time you reached out to your existing customer base? If you’re not doing it at least once a month, you risk losing your place in customers’ minds. This may sound like an exaggeration, but with the sheer amount of noise and distractions on the web – not just from your competitors – customer attention has become a valuable commodity. Unless you keep in touch with your previous diners, there’s a good chance they won’t return.
Following the introduction of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in 2018, email marketing has experienced somewhat of a renaissance. This is due to the fact that the majority of recipients now only receive emails they have opted in to get. Email marketing has defied its critics by continuing to provide an array of benefits to restaurants, from building trust and credibility to fostering loyal relationships with customers.
When it comes to creating an effective digital marketing strategy in the restaurant industry, email marketing is the next key piece of the puzzle to put in place, second only to a website. Whether targeting potential or repeat customers, it provides a direct channel to them, allowing you to create personalised communications that complement other efforts to maximise your marketing results and return on investment.
Gone are the days of blanket, mass emails. They are no longer effective and often end up in the spam folder. Data now must inform each campaign to ensure it reaches the right audience with the right content at the right time of day.
At Clove, we work hard to understand what you, as a restaurant, need in order to interact consistently with your customers.
That means developing an email marketing strategy, establishing methods of data collection, ensuring your campaigns are GDPR compliant, personalising content to be succinct and relevant, including specific calls to action, and making sure they are visually on brand and responsive across devices.
Services
FULLY MANAGED CAMPAIGNS
A complete campaign management solution – we take care of your email campaigns to ensure they deliver value to your audience, generate reservations, and provide measurable ROI for you.
CONTENT CREATION
We develop new content and curate existing material to help promote your restaurant and events, encouraging customers to click through and convert.
EMAIL TEMPLATE DESIGN
Each email campaign will be sent using an optimised email template, ensuring that your campaign looks great and is responsive across all devices.
EMAIL LIST BUILDING
We can add GDPR-compliant email capture forms to your website and Facebook page, or work with you to build lists and establish segments within your database from your online reservation system.
LIST MANAGEMENT
We maintain and clean your email list to ensure it continues to deliver the best value to you, allowing you to re-engage with or eliminate old contacts.
SUBJECT LINE OPTIMISATION
Ensuring that recipients open emails is somewhat of an art and requires testing to achieve the highest open rates. We use optimised subject lines to get you the best results.