Restaurant Marketing Help for all Businesses

E-Marketing Straight Talk
Logic is not entirely sure about you, but there is a world of marketing firms suggesting ($$$$$) that your business should do this and do that. All of this is fine if you are rich. What small businesses are afraid when doing a marketing campaign on their own is that if the process is not easy most business owners are going to give up early. Small business owners if you are like us here at Viper Logic we have to do a lot of our marketing on our own time and always on our own dime.

Established Business Client Retension
If you are like us at Viper Logic and you have been in business for quit a few years, then you are more out to understand this e-marketing article better then a new business owner looking to begin the process of driving clients to their business be it and online business or a real store business. Then like all of us business owners that have been a round for years we realize we need to be concentrating on retaining the clients we already have with us.

New Business Starts
This article today is like our way of giving the newer business owners the heads up that a lot of us had to learn on our own or a few years later or perhaps some of our fellow established business owners new these techniques about costumer loyalty and retention right from the start of their business?

We paint a picture of the scenario
We wanted to provide the environment below to get you into the scene of what we would all need to do to keep our businesses rolling forward during an economic slowdown.

Current Economic Conditions
To build a clientele we are going to use a restaurant, because being and avid group of people that eat out a lot we recognize how little restaurants do in the way of gaining loyalty and return business.
We also picked the restaurant industry as our example for another reason. That is that the amount of restaurants especially those high end steak houses and fusion style concepts, you know the ones, those larger chain establishments that serve 400.00 and 800.00 dollar or higher bottles of wine, or they did during the raging 2000’s anyways.
The economy has really gone south on us all and we can only hope that we at ViperMailer.com in some small part with our email marketing services can keep the, shall we say, “wine flowing”.

Business Travel is down
A report by the Hotelier Industry says that business travel in America has really dropped off and the report as well notes that more hotels are going after the leisure market in aggressive ways. In fact hotels are adding higher dollar room suites and fine lavish dining inside of their hotels to retain like we are sharing today.
The Hotels want to keep every dollar they can while a visitor is in their hotels.

They also site that hotel guest retention can only be helped by offering all of the visitor needs they can from right within the hotel grounds, reducing the visitor from leaving their hotel to visit other restaurants or services near their hotels.

Leisure Travel discresion spending is tight
This we will keep short because we already know that the economy in America is hurting us all, we also know that credit card balances have been running us all to our credit limits and reality is setting in. We are all being a whole lot wiser about when and where we are going to part with what money we have to spend.
This will likely be taking place more then ever since the Great Depression.

Hotelier Industry Learns from Las Vegas
We all have more then likely visited Las Vegas sometime in our lives we would assume? Notice that when you are there you land or drive into Las Vegas and you are almost immediately overwhelmed by the goliath size of these hotel properties and in fact they tend to sit way off of the main strip (congested by design) the road that runs through Las Vegas. All of this is for a reason.
Years ago Las Vegas realized that making it easy to get into their properties but had you drive around a little bit more then needed winding and scenic entrances causing us all to believe that entering the property was quit a ride and took time to do, while making it a little more diffacult to exit these properties would get you to do the following things.
A Stay inside the property, because you are already settled in.
B Eat and drink inside the property.
C Gamble only at their location.
D See shows within their venues.
E Shop inside of their stores or even their malls.

Las Vegas Plans
However the only way this was going to work was to build and offer the best of the best so that a customer would not even think of leaving the property, because if all the hotels were to do was to make leaving difficult then the experience of the visitor would not create the client loyalty and retention, but rather they would not return because the coming and going process was such and effort for them.

Las Vegas Wins
Las Vegas has built a complete empire around doing just that. The process was more then likely some trial and error, but today they have accomplished the goal they set out for. Las Vegas hotel operators have maximized their return on investment (ROI). That was one good roll of the dice pardon the pund but Logic could not resist this one.

Lets educate on how to retain diners with ease

Economic Forecast bottom and Recovery
Restaurant owners we are here to help you but we must in order to help you also share what we are thinking.
We think and the economy agrees that there are, far to many of the higher end restaurants today and there is not going to be enough people to support these stand alone and chain operators.
Our predicted economic recovery beginning in 2010 at the bottom we can expect modest visable results in sales until 2012 where we should be at a full new looking recovery. Economies never return to right where they were in the same fashion.

So these restaurants that want to grow their businesses are going to need to be do more, a whole lot more then just offering the finest in food and quality because, yes those two things may go hand and hand, but Logic is a consumer at all dining levels and those two points are expected of your restaurant business period.
Now we want to share with restaurants (single location and chains) to follow suit in their on special way by implementing some of the latest marketing procedures that will work for them.

Restaurant Customer Retention Tips and Techniques
These tips and techniques will work well for any business, however we selected to apply it to restaurants because we believe the Restaurant Industry is going to be hit really hard, because of the over building of restaurant businesses nationwide.

This is what the restaurants that want to not only survive but, to possibly expand during a down market. These tips and techniques will give the owners of restaurants and edge over their competition.

This is Seven Steps to Costumer Retention
Step 1
The first step is to generate a real buzz locally about your restaurant, advertisements are a great start with the locals, and you can even discount (as a last resort) that those living in our local zip codes will be given some type of discount if they come in for dinner on Sunday nights through Thursday nights. Save your full price seats for weekends when you are always busy with visitors and locals and visitors already, or you sure should be anyways.

Step 2
Lets talk about your web site here for a minute. Be sure that for the visitors, because it is not going to be used by the locals to much, that the web site is updated regularly with information about events or tastings. (for locals there is this) post event days, times, and details for the upcoming evening, it is easy and it does not cost much to do if you are not being your own web master already.
Be sure that regardless of whether you have a single location or a chain of locations that you check to be sure your web site comes up for restaurants in that city under all kinds of word combinations or searches on your favorite search engine. Try this for each locations city.
Next:
Add a sign up box for your site that asks for their first and last name along with their email address. Put this box on several of your web site pages and have the web master create a ‘Comma Deleted Format” Data Base to store this information. We will explain why you are doing this below.

Step 3
Lets go over your marketing materials.
You have table cards or displays on each table. Also put these cards in a holder in your waiting area with information about your restaurants events coming up, like wine tastings, chef cooking evenings, anything that will be of a great interest to locals more then visitors because your out of town business leisure travelers will more then likely not base nor plan their trips around your events.
More in Restaurant promotional locations
At each event have a card with the request of their first and last name as well as their email address that asks the persons at the table to sign up for future events because they are at an event, they are more then likely willing to sign up for sure to want to be included in up coming events.
Be sure this includes your web site address without those www. just put it on your printed material like this MyRestaurant.com so your materials are up to the way technology is currently used.
Ok more on those printed materials, we hope you can get some welcome to xxxxx city display cards customized to a visitors experience out to all of the local hotel concierges because these hard working people see all of the visitors one way or the other while they are here in your city. Treat these concierges well ($$$) because every restaurant and attraction is in their ear about how great they are as well.

Step 4
Each restaurant has a waiting area so to us it is like having a captive place where people sit and look at everything from those awards you or your staff have earned to images of some of your chefs finest presentations. Either way you can do more with this area of your restaurant and here is what it is. In the finer restaurants this can be applied as well.
Go out and find or buy one of those fancy colored (colored to hide identity, discretion) crystal bowls and in front of this bowl put a typed nice sign that explains that by dropping their card in this bowl they will receive customer loyalty discounts (because they are in your restaurant now) offers via email from time to time. We will explain why you are doing this below.

Step 5
Lets get your restaurant some press locally. If what you are doing locally is great enough then we will share how to get those releases into the travel magazines as well.
We suggest you attach your restaurant to one of the local chapter national fund raisers for a luncheon or dinner event, but remember this is for the slower weekdays and these are generally profitable for the restaurant by the way.
We do not want you to just give things away here this is your business and we always say in life nothing is for FREE.

The reason we want you to select a national charity with a local chapter is you might get national coverage through their newsletters. These charities usually have two of them, their electronic and their US Mail style newsletters. This might also get you coverage in the surrounding regional news publications and television as well. This type of approach can be done if you can work closely to get volunteers from the charity for that event, make the event an annual event as well.

This will get your restaurant into the local social scene, a very top level place to be when you need to depend on the local market for business during weekdays or seasonal quite times. People like to eat where they know the restaurant is involved in helping others and in the community. Donators generally have discretionary income to spend at your restaurant.

Step 6
Referrals and word of mouth business building.
Restaurant owners you might not know this but we bet you do, your customers tend to return because of the staff, and the staff starts with you the owner and customers always seem to love the owners of restaurants. Everywhere we go and everyone we talk to say this is true.
Now if you are not already doing this you might be missing out on the restaurants best asset, pimping out the owner. This is true in all of the restaurants we visit and here is what the restaurants that have been around many years do.
This is the tactic used by the single location restaurants
The owner of the restaurant makes his rounds, says hello and shakes hands with each person and talks a little extra with regulars especially when that regular has guests at their table that look new to the restaurant. The owner never asks how the food is because it should be assumed that the food is perfect after all it should be.
If you feel compelled to have to ask how is, or was your meal questions fine, have your help ask this while they are serving the table.

This is the tactic used by the multi location chain restaurants
We see how multi chain single owner restaurants handle the hand shake recognition practice. This example is a real restaurant chain located in several states that have 10 to 25 location and a single owner.
They through and annual anniversary dinner that you can advertise again locally to draw a crowd as well as again get some local press in each city once a year by having these special dining night events with the owner. The annual return customers will pack the house while adding even more new customers each year.
Special dining with the owner events generally allow you to charge more for this single night.

The referrals from your following are going to go through the roof over telling their friends what, where and with who they had dinner with and this will cause some viral communications for your restaurant or your restaurant chain.

Step 7
This is the final step on how to survive and grow your restaurant business during a down economy.
We have suggested that you collect on fill out forms on your tables at events, we have suggested you have a bowl with a sign to drop their business cards in your waiting area, and we have asked you to build a sign up box on some of your web site pages.

Now we are going to share the competitor advantage and in fact the lowest cost marketing tool you can use today to build on your brand, your customer loyalty, and all of this at the same time grow your business even during these rougher economies.

Sign up for and email marketing service which, we suggest our ViperMailer.com here email marketing services and open an account.

It is going to cost you $19.95 per month for 1000 contacts and we are going to have you add your data base from your web site of those names you have been collecting and upload them automatically to your confidential account area.
We next are going to ask that your web master install a small piece of software code (optional) onto your web site to bring those names into your account at ViperMailer.com automatically as they sign up and they are freshly interested in recieveing messages from you from time to time.

We are next going to take all of those business cards and those on the table event sign up forms and have a person take a little time to add them to your ViperMailer.com account.
We suggest that you do this task every couple of weeks to get your new email contacts into your emailing offers on a consistent basis.

Next you should design a colorful template using one of the 70+ we already offer for free. You might want to take this a step further and have your web master build a custom template using HTML code (the web master will know what this is if you do not) and they can upload the branded to your restaurant template into your account at ViperMailer.com.

You are now in a great position to gain marketing traction for your restaurant and your competition is going to see that you are growing your business while they are flat or slowing in their business.
Learn E-Marketing Tips and Techniques
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