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6 Effective Ways to Up Your E-mail Marketing Game!

Lip smacking delicacies, excellent service and out of the world ambience may no longer be enough to attract footfalls at your restaurant. It’s high time that you focus on e-mail marketing so that your brand name lingers in the minds of consumers. It prompts your customers to make repeated visits at your restaurant. As per the study conducted by Mckinsey, E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.

The highlight of e-mail marketing is that it’s quite cost effective. Irrespective of whether your restaurant is a high end or a medium sized one, you can still afford to do e-mail marketing. 

6 key aspects of e-mail marketing

Build an e-mail marketing list of your own 

Don’t waste your money by buying generic e-mail databases. It’s always recommended to create a list from the customers who visit your restaurant. 

 With the help of India’s leading digital restaurant management platforms such as inresto POS, now it’s quite easy. It offers services such as advance reservation and feedback management for customers. In the process, it collects the e-mail id of your diners. The other methods to collect e-mail id is by placing a sign-up form on your social media pages, blogs, mobile app and website. Offer incentives to diners such as 20% off on their next meal for providing their e-mail ids. Some customers may find it quite annoying to receive e-mails. Hence always tell your customers how they can opt out from the service.  

Make the subject line a click bait 

Keep in mind the below two points before framing the subject line of the e-mail. 

i)Specify the main point of the message

ii) Establish a personal connection with the reader.

As per the survey conducted by Business 2 Community, personalised subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened. Keep the subject line short and original, stick to the point and keep the number of characters below 50. Use your restaurant’s official e-mail id so that diners can identify it easily. 

Personalise your message 

Any customer would feel more valued when you address them by your names. Hence, instead of using “Hello Sir/madam”, mention their names in the e-mail. Stick to one message per e-mail. If it’s a limited period offer, mention the expiry date as well. 

If you are sending out a newsletter, mention about your signature dishes, new additions to your menu, share a recipe or a chance to meet the chef. With the help of restaurant management system’s data, track the birthdays of diners. Send an e-mail with a special discount offer, a free meal or a gift card. It helps to foster loyalty among customers.

E-mail frequency and timing is of prime importance 

Never bombard your customers with frequent e-mails. The ideal number would be once or twice a week or a month at an optimal day and time.

Prune your subscriber list 

Keep a track of those subscribers who don’t respond to your e-mails. Remove them from the subscribers list. However, before ending the subscription, send an e-mail and clarify the reason. Also mention the procedure for re-joining the subscriber list.

Evaluate the impact of e-mail marketing campaign 

Track important metrics such as open rate and click rate of e-mails. Always keep a CTA (Click to Action) in your e-mails. Explain in simple steps how customers can act on your e-mails. For example, if your objective is to make the diner avail a deal, the mail must end with a CTA. 

Parting Words

Restaurants are struggling with the challenges caused by Covid-19. Customers have become too hygiene conscious and they hesitate to visit restaurants. In this scenario, there should be some strong reasons for customers to come back to your enterprise. E-mail marketing can help you enormously in this regard and boost sales at your restaurants. 

 

 

  

How India Dined Out During The Great Indian Restaurant Festival 2018!

The Great Indian Restaurant Festival has been the talk of the industry throughout February with some great achievements. More than half of the inventory of restaurants was sold out in the first 2 weeks of February accounting for over INR 250 million revenue generation for restaurants. Read further as we delve into what were the trends attributing to the festival.

Diner Trends

GIRF 2018 saw 1 Million Indians eating out at the top restaurants in their city without burning a hole in their pockets. Since its launched, Dineout has had over 3 million diners visiting their platform for bookings and deals. Here are a few key trends:

  • Out of all these diners, 77% fall in the age group of 18-34 years.
  • Although Dineout has been receiving traffic from all over the country, the maximum number of diners, contributing to 55% of the total diner count, are coming from Delhi and Mumbai.
  • Over 50% of the total diners were visiting restaurants in groups of 2.

Highest Selling Deals

The maximum number of deals have been sold in Delhi, followed by Mumbai and Bangalore. Although food deals have been selling the most, buffet deals have been very popular across all cities. 40% of the restaurants selling buffet deals across the country have already been sold out.

How Restaurants Are The Stars of The Show!

From selling out all their inventory for the festival to a massive jump in diner count, restaurants have been in the limelight since the beginning!

  • Restaurants that earlier weren’t Dineout partners have seen a 2.5 times jump in their diner count once they came on board for the Great Indian Restaurant Festival.
  • One major highlight is that 60% of the bookings during the Great Indian Restaurant Festival has been for non-GIRF deals. Thus, the festival has helped restaurants acquire customers irrespective of the deal offered.
  • You can also check out a few rockstar restaurants that are already sold out:

Major Highlights

A major portion of these deals have been sold over the weekends throughout the month. Also, the average cost for two people during GIRF was only Rs 1000 across all cities.

With Delhi leading the show, buffets being a popular deal and people preferring to dine out in a group of 2, a lot of new trends came to light.

This festival is presented by Airtel Payments Bank, Pepsi as food partners, William Lawson’s CDs as beverage partner and NRAI as an industry partner.

Stay tuned for the full scoop at the end of the festival.

The Key to Enhancing Your Business Operations? Our New Restaurant POS Integrations

restaurant pos

In a changing world, there are changing ways of taking an order at a restaurant. It is no longer as simple as going to an eatery, placing an order, enjoying your meal and paying the bill then and there with either cash or card. Today, we like to order in, and for this, we have a number of new online aggregators taking our orders, Zomato, Swiggy, Scootsy, FoodPanda and UberEats, to name a few. With the growing aggregators also come the growing payment methods. Cash on delivery, paid online, paid by PayTM, the list goes on and on, making reconciling the month’s end statements rather tricky as well. That’s where Torqus Systems’ new integrations for the Point of Sale Software come in.

 

Our Restaurant Point of Sale software takes full care of all your restaurant frontend activities, revolutionizing restaurant management as we know it. It helps streamline billing processes and also enables evaluation and analysis of every branch by generating comprehensive reports. It is a one-stop-shop for all you restaurant front end needs.Now, the Torqus Point Of Sale Software has been amplified even further with certain new integrations, allowing your business operations to be augmented and enhanced even further.

 

The most efficient feature of the new integration is organized order-taking from a number of aggregators. Orders from online aggregators such as Zomato, Swiggy, Scootsy, etc. can now directly flow into your POS, making it very convenient to accept and process online aggregator orders. This not only reduces the time taken to process the orders into the POS, it also enhances order taking and prep time. This is a far more efficient method, ensuring orders are not missed and are ready much faster. This also enables for orders to be dispatched to the customer faster.

 

Due to the efficiency of this method, errors are also greatly reduced in the customer orders. It ensures that the correct set of items are sent to the customer and that the order amounts are accurate – no less and no more. This leads to a generally more content customer, better reviews and possibly more re-orders, which is the most important factor for any restaurant. Moreover, it offers customers a smooth and hassle-free ordering experience, leading to customer enjoyment and satisfaction.

 

Apart from helping with the customer satisfaction and easy order-taking, this integration also makes your inhouse work a lot simpler. For example, it helps restaurant owners reconcile the month and statements far more easily than otherwise, especially when orders are taken from numerous different aggregators and paid with different payment methods. Furthermore, some orders will have some discounts, some may be cancelled, some may be customized and some may be taken back; ordering is not as straightforward as it might seem. This integration takes into consideration all these scenarios and knows how to tackle them. Hence, reconciling everything at the end of the month becomes a piece of cake.

 

With all the above features, our Restaurant Point of Sale software integrations are a win-win situation for both the restaurant owners as well as the restaurant aggregators. We are currently working with quite a few restaurant aggregators with this software feature. Restaurateurs are very content with these integrations as they feel that it reduces a substantial effort on their part, saving them precious time and man power, and, at the same time, offering their customers a far smoother and better experience. Restaurants also should have tally integrations because it helps them avoid a lot of data entry and makes life much easier for their accountants as well.