How to Build and Manage an Email Database

Email marketing isn’t a new communication channel for restaurants or restaurant digital marketing by any means, but it is one that needs to be monitored and nurtured. A consistent newsletter strategy is a great way of sharing updates, offers and plenty more with your customer base, however, it’s important to ensure the content you’re sending is actually engaging your audience – otherwise, what’s the point? 

There are metrics in place that are indicative of whether a newsletter may have resonated with your audience – open rates, click-through rates etc – but these aren’t a perfect science and shouldn’t be the only thing taken into account within your restaurant newsletter marketing. Before even writing content, attention should first be paid to the audience database itself. 

Let’s take a database of 5,000 people. Chances are, those 5,000 people aren’t all coming to your restaurant for the same thing. Some might only be interested in your brunch offering, some might only frequent one of your locations etc. So, the same newsletter going to all 5,000 people might not always be the best idea. Instead, you should look to segment your audience and there are many options you could look at: segmenting by location, by interest, by spend etc. Dependent on the database platform you utilise, there will be different ways in which you can segment your audience and this is something to consider when choosing a database provider. 

Once your audience is segmented, you can then start developing copy, ensuring the most relevant content is going to each segment. You can also explore automations, which mean automatic updates will be sent to relevant segments at certain times, examples being: a birthday offer or an anniversary of subscribing offer, or perhaps someone has visited for their 10th time and you want to reward this. There are many different  – and creative – ways in which you can engage your audience! 

Lastly, it’s important to keep building your database too. Providing users with an easy way to subscribe to your database is key – either having an opt in button when they are making a booking or having a subscribe functionality on the website are two easy ways to do this. Then ensure you’re promoting your newsletter through your other channels – such as organic social – providing a clear CTA to customers to sign up. You can do this purely by promoting the type of content users can expect, or provide them with an incentive i.e. sign up to be in with a chance of winning a prize each month etc.  

Building and maintaining newsletter databases are a key area of restaurant digital marketing that we offer our clients at Me:Mo. If you’d like to hear more, please contact us here for more details!