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Social Media Marketing for Restaurants, Cafes & Bars: 4 – List Building & Email Marketing
Hello, Ken Burgin here with our 4th video in the fast track Social Media Marketing webinar
series for restaurant, cafes & bars. And this time, we’re gonna look at list building
and email marketing.
So, it’s much broader than just getting a list of email addresses. You may want straight
addresses. You certainly want to gather up mobile phone numbers when you can. But there’s
lots of different ways you can actually have people on your list even if you don’t know
their mobile or their email address.
Think of a whole variety of ways to people will be connected with you. You’ve got fans
on your Facebook page. You’ve got people checking in to you Foursquare site. You’ve
got people who follow you on Twitter. Yes, we still got business cards, we collect them
if possible. We got the fish bowl on the counter. That was once upon a time, the only way you
can do list building.
But look around your venue, how many of those people actually have a business card or have
it on them. A lot of them don’t have a business card at all, certainly in more casual places.
So we got to go broader than that.
Feedback forms always found, feedback forms though we put them at with the account for
people. About a third of people would feel immune with you know about 3 questions on
it. And, about a third of those, the people would fill them in would actually give me
contact detail. So, there’s a way to constantly harvest and build the number of people on
your list.
Don’t forget also that every year between 25 to 30 percent of your list are changed
email or changed jobs. Basically, the list is continually leaking quite heavily. You’ve
got to keep topping it up all the time.
You’ve got web site inquiries on your inquiry form. Pass a list around, often done that
in workshops. I ask people for contact details and I usually get about half the group happy
to provide those to me.
Your suppliers have got, they should be on your email list as well. And, keeping them
informed with what you’re doing. They’re --- of what you’re doing and suppliers are
always great talkers to other people as well. And look, think of this as a KPI. These are
measurable numbers. How many people on those lists? How many are we increasing each time?
How many are in our email list, for instance? And if you haven’t used your email list
for a while, chances are, if you got say 500 on your list, and you send out an email, probably
half or more of those may no longer be current. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just a fact
of life at why you need to be constantly updating.
Now, one of the most important ways I find to build your list is to have a good quality
bribe. And chances are, you’ve been to the Profitable Hospitality web site. And, --- and
said “Hey, do you want this e-book, 499 ways to cut cost?” Everyone wants to cut
cost and we get a huge and regular sign-up for that because we’re giving something
that’s a value. For all we want is a name and an email address. If you wanna click,
your interested, you can but that’s not compulsory. So, I like to have a name and
an email, you say your name is Mickey Mouse, I really don’t care just give me the minimum
details. The more information you ask to give, you may ask for state or suburb or phone number
or whatever. The more you ask for, the fewer people will signup. So keep it absolutely
to the bare minimum. Even just the email is sufficient and will give you an even higher
rate of response.
Now your bribe, again, I’m promoting business to business. But you’ll think about your
consumers that you’re chasing, what would appeal to them? Is there ten recipes you can
put up on a ten page PDF? Is there a party guide or how to run a great 21st birthday
or you know the 40ths and 50ths and 60th birthdays of fantastic and easy to run. What you’ve
got for those? Can you put together a wedding tips PDF for people to use? Maybe there’s
a coupon. Maybe there’s an insider information to your area. Something called for instance,
“The Ten Best Places That Most Tourist’s Tours Never See.” Yeah, that’s real value
for people to download and the only price is they gonna give you contact details.
So, the services are used, both of them, you can see them at the bottom, ConstantContact.com
and Aweber.com. You need to use a professional service, an online service because important
things have to be handled like unsubscribes, proper permission that, you know, most of
these services when people add their email, they need to confirm if that’s called double
opt in, those services all do that very effectively. If your just relying on Outlook from your
desktop, it’s just not enough once you get beyond even 50 up to 100 people. Beyond that,
once you start sending big emails, your service provider for your internet connection is probably
gonna close you down for 24 hours while they check out what is this high volume. They’re
worried about they might be spam.
So, yes emails are still relevant for, specially the 25 age group, professional people. You
know that’s their daily communication. Insert yourself into that. And of course we can start
to do some real messaging, not just 140 characters which is all we can do on Twitter. But don’t
write too long, remember, most people will just look at what’s in the top of their
email or the body of the email message when they open it. If it’s too long, they’ll
just flick it. They did not want to scroll. So, be very careful about putting very large
graphics, because of most email services when people open them they don’t see the photo
you put in there, they just see a blank.
The other advantage of course of using a professional service is you can start to see how popular
different links are. Here’s an example of the weekly Profitable Hospitality newsletter.
You can see there we got probably about 8 different links that people could click through
on. And, with a service like this, I can actually see which links are most popular. So on your
email newsletter, you can put links through to 3 different events and you’ll find the
most people are clicking on one event and the other 2 events has hardly any click. So,
guess what? That probably means that those 2 events, there’s not gonna be many bookings
for them. So let’s, in future, design different types of events so that content checking,
the popularity of different links very useful, the only thing that can only really be done
by using a professional service.
Really quite low price for them. You can upload your list through a spreadsheet. You can keep
everything online and access it any way. If you’re working from home one day, you can
send your email and newsletters at, without having to be on the PC at work. And, don’t
forget on the end of your email, it goes out for business, there should be a good promotional
signature. And, this is one that I got the other day, which I think is fantastic. Great
restaurant. See what’s down the bottom there. We got, do you wanna buy the book, do you
wanna make a booking, join us on Foursquare, on Twitter, on Facebook, here’s our website,
it’s all there. Automatically generated. I’m surprised, a little alarmed by the number
of emails I get from businesses where there’s no footer at the end at all. No signature
on the end, what a waste of opportunity. It’s not the major promotion that you do with email
but it’s constantly going at it.
So, so much that can be done with list building and email. We’re gonna be devoting a whole
one hour webinar to that topic, going really deep with lots and lots of examples and things
to do and things to avoid. And next video, now it’s gonna be one of the most important
topics on protecting your online reputation.
Don’t forget our full web seminar series coming up full one hour in all of those topics.
Lots of detail, lots of examples, lots of links to the services. You can signup at ProfitableHospitality.com.
Thank you.