Where do you advertise your restaurant at the moment?

In your local paper? The Yellow Pages? A local website? Leaflet drops in your local area?

Each of these methods can of course bring you some extra customers but let’s look at where they could also be wasting your money…

Firstly let’s consider an advert in the local paper – this could easily cost £50, £100 or more for a display advert that appears in just one edition of the paper.

If you’re like many restaurants, your advert will give details about your restaurant and your food, maybe a special offer you are running, or perhaps a special event.

Hopefully you’ll get some customers from the advert… but the reader is only being given two options… 1/ Decide to come to your restaurant or 2/ Turn the page and read more local news.

For every person who turns the page, a little of your advertising spend has been wasted as he or she is gone, and you are forgotten. The only way to contact that person again is to pay more money for another advert in another edition of the paper.

Similarly with leaflet drops in your local area – You’ve paid for all of the leaflets to be printed and for them to be delivered, but every leaflet that ends up in the rubbish bin is wasted money for you.

With Yellow Pages or website adverts, your advert is only any good when someone sees the actual page that your advert is on, but again, will they just leave the page and forget you?

Is there a better way?

You’ll be pleased to hear that there is a better way – it’s only a slight variation on what you are doing already – it will prove instantly profitable to you – and any advertising you do will reap rewards for months and months rather than just for the life of one advert.

The answer…

Use your advertising to build an email list

In other words, instead of your advertising giving the reader a choice of 1/ Visit us or 2/ Don’t, we give them a reason to join our email list…

So it could be…

Join our free email newsletter for exclusive special offers at XYZ Restaurant. Join now at www.

or

Enter our free prize draw and win a meal for 2 people at XYZ Restaurant. Enter now at…

With both of these examples, the reader is encouraged to give us their name and email address which is then automatically added to our email list.

But why is it better to build an email list?

Because when someone joins your email list you can contact them again and again. Gone is the one-hit wonder of the advert that either gets you a diner or it doesn’t.

When they join your email list, you can email them once a month, fortnightly, or even weekly if you want to, with information about your restaurant, details of special events, and special offers as you see fit.

As with many of the restaurants that I work with, over time this email list grows to 500, 1000, 2500 or more people, all interested in hearing about your restaurant. All people that you can contact time after time, month after month, and at very little cost.

So all of your advertising is actually building you an asset that becomes bigger and more valuable to you as time goes by.

Doesn’t that seem like a better way of using your advertising budget?

I really hope that you will use an email list as part of your promo strategy as I know that it will make a huge difference to your restaurant and your profits.

Best regards,
Chris Towland
Local Marketing Solutions