Plenty of restaurants take the time to collect email addresses of their patrons and periodically send out email campaigns promoting their restaurant. There are plenty of generic email marketing options and a few services that are geared specifically to the restaurant business (such as Fish Bowl).
Sending out periodic emails to restaurant patrons seems like a great idea. You ask them to give you their email address and you send them coupons once in a while. In fact, email marketing is one of the cornerstones of each ‘Customer Loyalty Program’. The question is how effective this type of marketing really is?
People are spending less and less time reading their email. The laboriously put together email campaigns go largely unnoticed. How many restaurant emails do your thing an average restaurant patron is willing to take a look at on weekly basis? The graph below displays how much time the Internet users in the U.S. spend on individual activities online.
As you can see, Email occupies less than half the time than Social Networks/Blogs. Why is this?
First of all, for whatever reason, emails sent as a part of an email campaign are infrequent and extremely bloated. I bet you that reading an average email campaign from top to bottom would take you at least 15 minutes. According to the graph above, you’d have to devote about 3 hours worth of your ‘email attention’ to read this single email. That’s just not going to happen.
The rise of Twitter and the Facebook Wall clearly show that we’re moving toward frequent ‘bite sized’ information that one can just glance at and get the gist right away. Email just does not cut it anymore for this purpose.
The Diningverse Scoop (or D’Scoop) is an excellent way to keep restaurant patrons updated on what’s happening at a restaurant. It is automatically aggregated on the restaurant’s local area page and displayed to all patrons that recommended the restaurant and added the area to their ‘My Areas’. You can think of it as Twitter specifically for restaurants.
