How a Restaurant Could Use Autopilot Marketing Systems To Keep Diners Coming Back

If you own or manage a restaurant the chances are that the main focus of your marketing is to get new customers to come through the door. This is all well and good but often restaurant owners who focus purely on new customers are not maximising the income that they could be making if they shifted some of their marketing focus to following up with their existing customers.

These days it is not enough to simply give diners good food and service and hope that they will remember you and come back again. You need to be a bit more proactive. However if you are on a limited budget what can you do to get diners back through your doors that won’t require too much hard work?

In the past setting up something like this was often time consuming or prone to human error. With Autopilot Marketing Systems we can make this much more straightforward. Our system is set up with mailing houses aready so all marketing materials are sent out automatically with no need for you or your staff to actually print, address or lick a stamp.

The first step is to devise a way to collect the contact details of your diners so that you can start to build a list of them. By using something simple like the above form and having your waiting staff give this to each customer with their bill you can start to capture your guests details.

Then it is simply a matter of having one of your staff enter the details into the contact manager of your Autopilot Marketing Systems (AMS) account. You can then set up a number of different campaigns that can run automatically for each contact added to the system.

For example you could send an email a couple of days after they dined with you thanking them for their business and making them an offer to come back, or maybe introducing another of your services, such as outside catering, that they may not have been aware you offered.

You can set up seasonal campaigns so for example you might set up a Valentines campaign that makes an offer of a free bottle of wine to all diners who book the Valentines meal special. This could be set up to send out an email, postcard or letter say 10 days before Valentines day.

Or if you have captured the birth dates of your diners you could then send them targetted offers in the run up to their birthday. AMS allows you to set up campaigns based on dates or based on a sequence of steps. All marketing pieces that are sent from the system can be completely personalised with the recipients details such as their name – this has been proven to increase response rate.

AMS can also be used to fill your restaurant at the last minute. If bookings are looking thin for a particular evening then you could send out a SMS message to all off the diners on your list offering them a great special if they come in that evening. Response rates for this kind of targetted SMS offer can sometimes be as high as 30% and the cost of this type of campaign is relatively low.

So I hope you can see how powerful AMS is for capturing your customers details and then allowing you to keep in touch with them at meaningful times of the year.

We can even help you in creating marketing pieces, or you can choose to outsource the data entry of the lists to us as well. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to use AMS to maximise the income from your restaurant.

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