Don’t underestimate the influence of email marketing to your restaurant business. This approach still gets valuable results. All you need to do is follow these seven simple steps.

Of course, for this to work, you are going to need a great email list of potential customers. So how do you go about collecting the email addresses of prospective punters?

One great way is to have a digital form on your website which people can complete to join your mailing list. Obviously, you will need some enticement, such as discount coupons. Another possibility is to collect the email addresses of those customers who walk in through the door, so offering the option to share their email for a free drink on-premises, or something along those lines, is a really smart option. You could also have a prize draw for a free meal, with participants only needing to share their contact details. You can see how you can easily start to gather the vital information you need.

You really shouldn’t send out the same emails to your entire list. Instead, start to tailor according to the customer’s interactions with you. So, if someone has already eaten in your restaurant, you can segment them into a different grouping from those who have never walked through your door. Depending on the type of interaction, you can then start to use targeted emails which appeal more directly to that demographic.

So, what do you actually send via email to these potential customers? Well, of course, promotional material about your restaurant. The only thing you need to remember here is to make the promotion relational to the person you are sending the email, too.

“Making your marketing emails relevant is key. How do you do that? There are a number of simple tips to follow, starting with making your promotions seasonal, such as related to holiday periods, and then ensuring that the offer is enticing. That means you need to learn more about your demographic as you go along to eke out the most from this marketing approach,” says Melinda David, a marketer at Academized and StateofWriting.

You don’t need to be Hemingway, but putting together well-written, catchy emails that are concise and relevant to the reader will go a long way to attracting more customers through the door. Fortunately, there is plenty of online help these days.

Study demic and Academ Advisor are great sources for copywriting guides, ensuring your marketing is to-the-point, and enticing.

Big Assignments and Ox Essays are fantastic editing tools, ensuring your content is pitched perfectly.

For those with concerns about grammar, ViaWriting and MyWritingWay are smart grammar checker tools which can help you with this part of your writing.

And for that all-important proofreading, look no further than Australian Help and Paper Fellows.

Loyalty means a lot in the restaurant business: repeat customers who keep coming back and who are likely to be great individual marketing mouthpieces for your business. Do not underestimate the power and influence of these types of customers, and never take them for granted.

That means that you need to have some sort of loyalty scheme in place linked to your email marketing approach, offering special prices and discounts to those regular repeat customers. Segmenting is vital along these lines, but then make sure that you use the right kind of relational promotions to these repeat customers, offering thanks and making it clear that the offer is specific to them as a valued customer. Nothing works as well as personalized emails which thank and reward those customers. People want to feel special, so make them feel this way.

You may have gathered that this is no simple and quick task. Compiling your email list, segmenting as necessary and ensuring that emails are sent out at the right time to the right people does require you to be on the ball. Fortunately, you can avail of some great software which will automate all of these tasks for you, leaving you free to do what you do best: run a restaurant.

You must keep track of what your email marketing approach is producing for you. That means everything from response rates to ROI. Again, there are tools, often the same, that can help you to achieve this. But don’t overlook it for a moment. You can’t spend time and money sending materials out into the ether without gathering concrete data regarding the success of that approach. You can then use this data to tailor and tweak, ensuring you get more out of the activity each time.

Ellie Coverdale is a lifestyle and marketing writer at Boom Essays as well as at UK Writings. She has been involved in many projects down the years, which she has taken valuable learning experiences from, and she also teaches writing at Essay Roo.