How should you tackle email marketing for your restaurant? Fishbowl can show you how! Fishbowl is yet another great benefit you receive when you are a member with the NMRA. Fishbowl is a website that you can use to help you e-mail all of your clients, employees, or customers all at the same time. As a matter of fact, Fishbowl is what we use here at the NMRA to e-mail all of our members!
Some people may say that E-mails are a thing of the past and that if your restaurant really wants to make any headway, social media is the place to post, but don’t dismiss e-mails altogether just yet. Ryan Kelley, a Sales Representative from fishbowl says that e-mailing and social media posts are just two sides of the same coin for an independent business. He says that “In 2015 you can’t master online marketing unless you touch both channels. [e-mails and social media].”
Ironically enough, the Fishbowl representative compares marketing to fishing; “The more lines you have in the water, the better chance you have of making a catch.” This way of thinking is guaranteed to reach more people, because you are catering to where your guests are. Now your guest that don’t have a social media page can still easily see all of your announcements and offers.
However helpful all of this emailing and posting may be, no one said it was easy. All of this can be really time consuming for an owner of an independent restaurant. A great way to integrate the two and make it simpler, is to have a link, or a way to join your email list on your social media pages. Then, if someone wants to receive your e-mails they can sign up themselves and you never have to manually put them on a list. Another important tip is to know the difference between an add, and a post on these sites. You will need one more than the other depending on who you want to reach or what information you are sharing.
These tips can help tremendously, but the biggest advice that the NMRA could give to you is to use fishbowl. Fishbowl has recently created a website that individual restaurants can use to send out bulk e-mails, that are posted to Facebook for you automatically. We can’t say enough about the weight fishbowl can lift off of your shoulders, and all of the help that it gives with your online presence can help put your restaurant on the map. The setup is fairly easy and if you are one of our many members, you get to use the website for free. More…