Small Business Email Marketing 2022

Tired of customers not learning about your special offers, events? This is common for small businesses and even some established restaurants. Unfortunately, reaching customers can sometimes be tricky and often becomes guesswork. Therefore, It’s important to create a strategy instead of having an inconsistent method of outreach. This blog discusses the importance of creating a solid strategy for reaching out to customers as well as personalizing your message. 

Personalization is crucial to having your own personal touch in outreach and standing out in your customer's inbox/messages. Sadly, most don’t focus on this aspect which makes most of the messages received by your customers feel like cookie-cutter templates. This is the main reason why most customers disregard emails/messages because they think it’s just spam/promotional garbage. 

This blog will discuss the importance of avoiding these half-baked strategies because we want to attract customers not repel them.

Email Marketing Tools 2022

Now let’s get to the knit and gritty of this subject by discussing the most used email marketing tools. Let’s get this out of the way first, there are many marketing tools nowadays it can be overwhelming which one to choose. Since most of them are either freemium or subscription-based it’s necessary to evaluate them carefully. This section will have a table outline of which tools are the most effective for small business marketing and their price points.

Free Email Marketing Tools 2022                                                            

These are just some of the tools available out there for Email marketing, I’ve colored the boxes gold for the most effective in my professional experience. They are all good tools there isn’t a bad one per se though it matters more about your budget and mailing list size. 

Now let’s discuss the next important pillar of email marketing campaigns, the design itself. 

Email Design Ideas For Restaurants

            Source: Dining Restaurant Template Pinterest

Design is the most important pillar of delivering your message and maintaining the recipient's attention. In today’s age, it’s hard to keep our attention with so many things that already call for it. Unfortunately, It’s the same with your customers since they already get advertised so many services and products daily. It’s said that the average American get’s exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 ads each day! So it’s very hard to even convince your customers to open up your email and read it. 

 Digital Design Layout 

For this section I will use Cracker Barrel as an example of laying out your content design and template. While it’s not completely related to small businesses looking at successful brands and how they implement content. 

                                
                                                                                                
                     Full Image View: Email Template.png

This image shows the best way to break down an email template by section. Now, this is just a general email template and these can change based on promotion, special events, or content type. Since there are so many types of content types you can add to your template I suggest planning it out before creating your templates. Planning for email campaigns can be a tedious process depending on how far ahead you are planning or how sophisticated you want to be.

Effective Email Copywriting

Now comes the main body of the email which will need to be placed in the right context. Identifying context will allow you to develop different email templates for various users and buyer personas. Therefore, It’s important to understand who your audience is and how they will react to your email copy. You need to resonate with your audience so segmentation will be perfect for dividing different audience groups. 

Additionally, you don’t want to bore the recipients with dull Copywrite, here we discuss various grammar mechanics and keyword research.  Moreover, you need to experiment with email headlines keep them short and to the point. Less is more and the point is to avoid sounding spammy or trying to do a hard sell since this is what populates most of your recipient's inbox. There are two ways you can stand out is by using ALL CAPS (not recommended most of the time) or using the power of emojis.

Here are some examples of ways to write a clear headline

• Selling proposition
• Unique selling point
• Core values
• Offer amount or percentage then (write detail here)

 For the body copy it’s important to space out your writing and keep paragraphs short. Nobody is going to spend their time trying to decipher or understand a whole essay. People don’t have the time. Also try to personalize your writing as much as you can, instead of saying “you”,”your '' try to add their name throughout the body whe needed. 

Common Personalization Variables 

• First Name
• Last Name
• Full Name
• Email Address

Here's an example of how to add custom variables

Summary of Email  Body Structure

1. The Subject Line
2. Body Copy 
3. Call To Action (CTA)
    

Previewing Email Copy

Now to wrap up your email planning, It’s important to preview your templates before sending them out. You can also create variations by split testing your copies so I’ve created this tool as a way to preview your main body text. The benefits of using this spreadsheet is that it allows you to personalize your body text without adding HTML tags. Allowing you to preview how they would look like once added to your actual email marketing platform. 

This spreadsheet is very easy to use all you need to is modify the yellow cells/squares based on the information you want to see. These symbolize the html tags, and the templates are based on research I’ve personally done to find compelling main body copywrite. You can also add your own versions based on your research/necessity. Lastly, you will see the preview where it combines all the fields to view your copy. 

Things to remember

• Filter by intent depending on what context you want to see
• Change the recipient name or keep it based on personalization preferences
• Restaurant number needs to be changed to your business number
• For your restaurant URL: add the default main destination like your homepage or menu URL
• Be sure to “make a copy” once you enter the spreadsheet.
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Conclusion paragraph

Thank you for reading this far! I know this is a lot of information and it’s overwhelming at face value. However, creating an effective email marketing campaign can result in higher online orders, returning customers, and establishing consistent customer relationships. Moreover, our online ordering platform will allow you to pay less per transaction.

For reference here is a visual of cost per order based on the number

Additionally, we offer Self Service Kiosks which can be a unique selling point for convenience when your restaurant has long lines. Furthermore, we can easily set-up your mailing campaigns and you don’t even have to worry about any of this heavy lifting. Our Empowered Marketing program focuses on managing your digital marketing campaigns from SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Mailing campaigns. 

Yet, we don’t want you to feel pressured so we are giving you a totally Free Business Evaluation. Where you can decide if you want to use our marketing program.  For learning how we can help your business, please contact info@OrderEm.com or call us at (855) 210-APPS