What is email marketing personalization?

Email marketing personalization refers to the practice of tailoring marketing emails specifically to individual recipients to create a more personalized and engaging experience.

Rather than sending generic mass emails to everyone on your email list, personalization allows restaurants to craft relevant content and offers that cater to the specific interests and preferences of each recipient.

By using data such as past purchases, dining history, and customer preferences, restaurants can deliver targeted messages that resonate with their audience. This not only helps to improve customer loyalty and engagement but also boosts the effectiveness of marketing efforts, leading to higher open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.

With the right data management, audience management and email marketing platform and strategy in place, restaurants can leverage the power of personalization to create meaningful connections with their customers and drive business growth.

The benefits of email marketing personalization for restaurants

Email marketing personalization offers numerous benefits for restaurants. By tailoring the email content messages to specific customer groups or segments, restaurants can significantly improve brand awareness, open rates, and generate more revenue from each campaign.

The benefits of personalization for restaurants are clear

• Personalization can increase brand awareness and customer loyalty by making customers feel valued and appreciated that you took the extra mile. By sending unique content that is aligns with their interests and lifestyle, customers are more likely to remain engaged and loyal to the restaurant.
• Personalization is a great opportunity to establish your restaurants target audience and core audiences. A brand that is able to create a unique vibe, while listening in and leaning in to what their audience wants has a greater opportunity of converting a regular customer into a rabid fan.
• Personalization offers insight into untapped opportunities that a restaurant brand can choose to test and iterate on. This is an invaluable source of information that can be used to fine-tune marketing campaigns and adjust the customer experience accordingly.
• Personalization also influences the overall customer experience. When a brand can remain consistent throughout the customer journey, ultimately strengthening their relationship and loyalty.

Growing your customer list is an important aspect of restaurant marketing, but it is not the only factor to consider. Ultimately, you'll want to invest the time and resources to re-engage the people who said "yes please, I'd like to support your business. Please reconnect with me in a meaningful way."

What you need to get started: The right data and dynamic segmentation tools

A data management solution that understands your data from different systems and the dynamic segmentation of your customers into separate lists is a crucial step in achieving effective personalization.  Once these two workflows are in place, you can easily design your personalized customer journeys.

With this strategy, restaurant businesses can send highly targeted messages to specific customer segments. For example, they can reach out to first time customers who made a purchase through a specific channel (online ordering, delivery) and a specific product category (baguettes, macarons and apricot tarts) with a few different touch points like:

• A short post visit survey via SMS or email with prior permission 
• A follow-up email message introducing your brand listing different guest engagement perks.
• If the customer's profile shows that they reside within a 12-mile radius of your store, inviting them back for a happy hour with a perk for locals could enhance the perception of your restaurant in the buyer's mind.

Beyond the content of your email marketing messages, timing plays an important role too. An email marketing platform that supports dynamic journeys triggered by a date, an action or a milestone becomes a valuable tool in elevating your personalization strategy. 

Scale your marketing resources with dynamic data management and segmentation 

Collecting and growing your customer list is an important aspect of restaurant marketing, but it is not the only factor to consider. Ultimately, you'll want to invest the time and resources to re-engage the people who said "yes please, I'd like to support your business. Please reconnect with me in a meaningful way."

In this section will cover how to grow your email and SMS subscriber list, how to keep your subscribers active and engaged and the role of dynamic segmentation in your personalization strategy.

So, how do you grow your email database? Here are some effective techniques:

In today's digital age, email marketing has become an essential marketing channel for restaurants. Building a strong and engaged email database is crucial for the success of your email marketing campaigns. It allows you to directly reach out to your audience and deliver relevant content that drives customer loyalty and boosts your restaurant's overall revenue.

1. Offer access to guest WiFi: Encourage your customers to provide their email addresses in exchange for access to your fast guest WiFi and beautiful space. A branded captive portal technology can help increase brand awareness and provide information about your business to potential customers. 

Here's a deep dive into the benefits of WiFi Marketing. 

2. A direct integration with your POS (point-of-sale): Your point-of-sale system holds a lot of your customer data. Consider the information that is exchanged during an online order, pick-up, or dine-in order. One challenge faced by many restaurateurs is that the information collected by a POS system is often underutilized by restaurants for re-targeting their audience in a way that allows for highly personalized messaging and touchpoints. Integrating your email or SMS system with data from your POS system is essential for your personalization strategy.

3. Collecting data from your reservation and catering systems: Similar to your POS, a reservation system and catering system (if separate from your POS) hold a lot of customer data that you can leverage to learn about your audience and re-target each customer group with personalized engagement and offers. 

4. Locals only special offers: Create exclusive promotions and discounts that are only available to your local customers. This not only incentivizes your restaurant's local audience customers to share their email addresses but also increases the chances of them becoming regular customers. Localizing your offers is possible with dynamic segmentation. 

5. Product focused experiences. When you have access to your customer data, personalization efforts become more meaningful. When product preferences are passed on to your customer database, it is easy to implement customer journeys that are product focused.  A personalization strategy that is focused on your customer's product preference is a great way to offer combo deals and a one-click ordering experience. Humans are creatures of habit, so when a loyal customers simply loves to order guacamole, chips and a burrito for lunch why not curate that combo meal for them and automate the process? 

6. Create seasonal dining programs: Organize your marketing calendar around seasonal events and milestones for each quarter. Even better when you can localize the message and experience for each market (if your restaurant business is operating across multiple markets / regions). 

These are some techniques and ideas that may inspire additional unique ideas for your restaurant business.  By implementing these ideas, you can steadily grow your email and SMS list and unlock the potential of personalized email marketing campaigns. 

A few more personalization email examples.

Dynamic segmentation enables the automation of your customer journeys.

Segmenting your email list or SMS list is a crucial step in effective email marketing personalization for the restaurant industry. By organizing your list into different segments, you can create targeted and relevant content that resonates with your target audience, resulting in higher campaign performance and sales.

Understanding your customer personas  

What are customer personas? A customer persona is all about understanding who your customer is. Customer personas help businesses understand their target audiences by identifying demographic information, pain points, motivations, and behaviors.

By developing one or two common customer personas, your restaurant and food service businesses can gain valuable insights into their audience's needs, preferences, and buying habits.  Dive deeper into customer personas.

To find the unique traits of each customer persona and how each persona engages with your restaurant could be an influence of age, gender, preferences, place of residence, and status (single, in a long-term partnership but not or married, divorced). 

How to get started with customer segmentation 

When all your data is centralized in a CRM, it becomes easier to utilize the same information in an email marketing platform. 

Selecting an email marketing platform that seamlessly works with a customer data management platform, effectively handle dynamic segmentation, and accommodate both simple and complex customer journeys is crucial for the success of your personalization strategy and execution. 

Here are a few basic customer segments to consider for your restaurant

These are customer segments that can be easily implemented with the right data and email marketing tool.

1. Customers who live within a the 12 mile radius of your restaurant's physical location
2. Customers with birthday information 
3. Customers who connected to your guest WiFi 
4. Customers with a frequency visit of more than 1
5. Customers who purchased a specific combination of products. Example: a cold brew and a chocolate croissant
6. If you're using a loyalty program you are probably seeing your segment of customers who are not redeeming their rewards. So you may want to create a customer journey that triggers after a reward milestone is reached. 

Recommended reading: A personalized guest experience is your key to success.

The role of a powerful analytics tool when implementing your personalization strategy

A powerful analytics tool to help you execute a brand-wide restaurant personalization strategy is essential to your success.

An analytics platform gives you immediate access to actionable insights that is otherwise visible after crunching a lot of data from your email campaigns and sales channels - this process can take hours and many days without a powerful analytics tool.

At GoGoGuest our customers gain access to engagement performance, which tracks the effectiveness of an email or sms campaign.  Meanwhile, our sales performance analytics tracks how well each campaign contributes to actual sales.

With the right tools you can measure the ROI from your email marketing tool and the resources you need to create and produce your email marketing programs. The value of a campaign engagement varies from brand to brand across each category and local market. 

For example: A coffee shop brand that is based in a city like Portland, OR or Redondo Beach, CA may see their average purchase each visit anywhere from $6.50 (for a latte) to $12.00 (for a latte and a croissant). Meanwhile, a cafe that is based in New York City would see an average purchase of $15.75 for the same items. 

Conclusion

Implementing email marketing to launch your restaurant's personalization strategy can be a cost-effective option for independent to medium-sized restaurant groups and businesses. Start by gathering all your customer data in one place, create segments based on visits and location, elevate the guest experience with personalized customer journeys with high-value offers.

Next Steps

Personalization execution should include: accessing data, understanding your audience and customer segments, and designing personalized customer journeys based on behavior and key demographic attributes are important factors.  Ready to dive in? Book a demo. 

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