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Welcome to Restaurant Marketing School.
I'm Josh Cople, a Michelin rated restaurant tour.
Together with Chip Clothes, we're unpacking the tools and tactics used by
a million dollar marketing agencies to help you grow your restaurant.
Join us daily for a marketing tip you can use in your restaurant today.
Today we're going to talk about using automation to romance the sale.
Romance means Chip Clothes.
So, romanceing the sale is a hospitality term that the hotel side uses.
There are things that hotels do really well that we can learn from.
This idea of romanceing the sale.
Perfect example. When you make a reservation, you make a reservation for a restaurant,
and you get an automated email that says, great, you're all set.
We'll see you next Thursday, night seven, a clock party, a two,
per functory, right?
But there are automation tools now.
Listen, the rest of the world's been using these ecommerce has been using these for a decade and a half
two decades.
We can set an automation sequence now based on certain things, right?
So, when they book a reservation, we can send them an email that now not only confirms,
but gets them ready. Romance is the sale.
Like, let me show you, let me talk about our new fall dishes, right?
Our new fall lineup.
Let me talk to you about our new wines by the glass we're just bringing in as the weather starts to turn.
There are so many different ways to get people ready for it.
And again, hotels do this really well because you book the reservation,
and then over time it's like, can we book you a massage?
Can we set up some excursions, would you like some dinner reservations?
Can we book you a tea time?
They're trying to number one, get more sales,
but also try to make your experience better.
We can use automation even if we don't use it to sell, right?
We talked about yesterday, you know, how we can sell before and after the meal proper.
But we can also use automation tools just to get them ready for this really great experience.
Again, it's another thing that most restaurants haven't even touched yet.
Talk to me about what that looks like in practical application and a more casual environment.
It's the same thing.
Somebody has said, I like what you do, I like what you do enough,
I trust you enough to book a reservation.
What you do, what we all do is extraordinary.
Whether it's fine dining, you're sourcing from really extraordinary ingredients or whatever,
or whether you're using grandmother's pasta sauce recipe or the old pizza recipe that your dad taught
you or whatever I'm bringing, you know, boardwalk pizza to this new.
What you're doing is exceptional.
Certainly exceptional enough for you to invest money and time and effort and energy
and for you to convince people day after day after day to become a customer.
So what we do is special.
All we have to do is tell people about it.
Tell people that it is special.
Why it's special?
Sean Wallschef, my friend in colleague talks about this all the time and he says,
he talks about your why, figuring out your why.
And I add to it, I add my why.
Number why is why did you start doing this in the first place?
And my why that I always add to that is why should anyone else care?
Whether we realize it or not, that's what our customers are asking us.
Explicitly or implicitly, every time they look at your website, they look at your social media pages,
they look at an email, they want to know, why do you do this and why should I care?
Why should I be a part of it?
So simply just telling your story, all that content you talk about,
producing and repurposing, people want to know your story.
They want to know why I should engage with you.
Why I should come be a customer.
I couldn't agree with you more.
Our content strategy when it came to romance in the sale before and after came down to this one idea,
which was, we thought you would think this was cool.
Right.
Wanted to share this with you.
And so the week that you had a reservation at the restaurant,
we would send you an email.
And in the email, it just said like it was playing text.
And then just said, check out this link.
We thought you would enjoy this.
And it was a behind the scenes of us prepping out some of our signature dishes in the kitchen.
And people loved it.
And they would reply back, thanks so much.
Can't wait to show up.
And when you do that, you're going to get 20% open.
30% open.
But those 20 or 30% that do open it are going to love that you did that.
They're going to spread it far and wide.
They're going to talk about it.
You're going to get them even more excited than they already were.
You're doing it for the believers again.
The market fails when they try to convince you of two things.
We are not trying to convince people of two things.
We're trying to find people who believe what we believe.
And then we're just trying to get them really excited for the experience.
In the last point that I'll share here,
it's an opportunity to teach people how to talk about your restaurant.
So true.
When you provide this kind of correspondence,
and it can even happen at the table.
When we would have our servers come up to the table and say, hey, is this your first time?
And we would explain our why.
And we would do it in a way that we were providing them with a singular talking point.
So when they left the restaurant and they told other people about their experience,
they would say, oh, do you know, these guys started this restaurant because of X?
And it creates this virtuous marketing cycle.
If you want to hear previous episodes or check out our other content,
go to restaurants.yelp.com forward slash marketing school.
Thank you so much for listening to the show.
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While you're there, please leave us a review.
I'm Josh Koepel, and you've been listening to restaurant marketing school.
