Remarketing for Restaurants

Restaurateurs are always looking for ways to bring in new customers.

But once the customer comes through the door, the more important question should become, “How do I get them to come back?”

This is where the power of restaurant remarketing comes into play.

Harvard Business Review has revealed that acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.

Further, a Bain & Company study showed that increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%.

One visit to your restaurant is not enough to make your brand come to mind when a prospect is ready to find a dining establishment. You need to get your brand in front of them over and over again.

Remarketing for restaurants has proven to be the best answer for brick-and-mortar marketers in today’s world of digital marketing.

Remarketing is a powerful way to connect with visitors to your website or customers who have logged into your WiFi. It allows you to send targeted advertising, behavior driven promotions to those people through online advertising or email marketing.

It’s a key marketing concept that should be a primary focus of restaurant owners and marketers.

Types of Remarketing for Restaurants

When someone visits your website or captive portal, an internet cookie is added to their browser.

The cookie contains anonymous data about the visit. This data includes information such as which pages they viewed or how long they were on your website.

When the user visits other websites, the cookie will communicate with your advertising platform and your ad will be displayed on the other website’s page.

This is known as standard retargeting.

It allows your brand name and image to be shown to the user consistently as they browse the internet.

Your ads can also be positioned on the top social media websites, such as Facebook and Instagram. Or on video websites like YouTube or Vimeo.

Use Content Marketing to Increase Website Visits

It is necessary to get users to your website so that you can place the cookie in their browser.

A great way of doing this is to attract them to your website using content marketing best-practices.

Although it may seem counter-intuitive at first, content marketing on the surface is not about selling. It’s about providing useful, informative and entertaining content – content that your audience wants to read.

It should be educational, answering questions and solving problems.

This will position your brand as trustworthy and worthy of giving business to. You are essentially earning awareness, respect and trust of current and potential customers.

Over time, your website  and restaurants traffic will grow, along with your email subscriber list. As website and restaurant traffic grows, you’ll be able to market to more individuals and their friends.

Using Email Marketing for Marketing Success

By collecting customer contact information, ideally their verified email address, marketers can send unobtrusive branded promotions, surveys and other valuable information to their targeted lists of email subscribers.

This further strengthens your brand awareness, placing it in front of your customers over and over again.

This is where Bloom’s WiFi marketing and WiFi analytics growth tools can supercharge your restaurants email marketing strategy.

Very much like traditional online retargeting you can use the Bloom WiFi sensors to trigger advanced marketing campaigns based upon a customer’s presence on or off your locations.

Then leverage all the cleaned data that Bloom uses to build customer insight, and customer profiles to send personalized messages, offers or surveys to your customers to build customer loyalty.

It’s important to remember that you shouldn’t simply send shameless mass email marketing campaigns to your customers. You take the risk of having your email reported as spam if you don’t use segmentation to personalize your messaging. Or worse, users will unsubscribe from your list. Always provide valuable information in your emails.

Many restaurant marketing professionals feel they need to only send discounts or free item offers to their subscribers, but this is just not always the case.

Instead, send your subscribers more engaging, positive and informative content, such as surveys, event information, menu ideas, special offers, website content or new menu items.

These types of messages make readers feel much more comfortable engaging with your brand and builds brand affinity.

Onboarding Automation: The Low Hanging Fruit

Earlier we mentioned customers logging into your captive portal to place a cookie in their browser.

But there’s another more powerful benefit of using your physical location’s WiFi captive portal – collecting customers digital profiles which include verified emails, names, phone numbers, demographics and presence analytics.

By requiring a verified email address to log into your WiFi, you’ll be passively building your list of emails.

Over time you can build a list of hundreds of thousands of subscribers for your multi-unit restaurant chain to whom you can retarget, all while increasing your brand visibility and top-of-mind awareness.

Passively collecting customer profiles to further enhance your restaurant marketing strategy supercharges your marketing efforts.

This will allow you to easily filter and segment your subscriber list.

By segmenting your list into smaller, more focused groups, you can send personalized content to each group that is written specifically to resonate with that group, increasing engagement.

Always Be Testing

For it to be effective, marketers need to be attentive to the messaging customers will see. Also, how often they see it and through what channels.

It requires monitoring to realize which messages are resonating the best, and then optimizing for even better results.

Testing and optimizing should include:

• Different ad sizes, platforms and formats
• Various types of content in your emails
• Different ad or email schedules
• Customer segmentation

Through evaluation and A/B testing of your messaging you will know what works best for your restaurant chain in terms of ROI.

So, remarketing for your restaurant can be the catalyst you’ve been searching for.

Not only to build customer loyalty and acquire new customers, but to keep your restaurant top-of-mind to keep them coming back again and again.

 

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