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How to connect with diners during a pandemic: Your guide to personalized email marketing

The world is changing fast and restaurants are trying to adapt just as quickly. Now is the time to get creative, stay flexible, and build stronger authentic connections—so we worked with the experts in email marketing at Emma on a guide to personalized email marketing that resonates with today’s diners.

When we connected with diners in our July COVID-19 Survey, many talked about feelings toward eating out again, how they are more comfortable with dining outdoors, and the importance of safety precautions to dine out.

With these insights and our ever-changing environment in mind, email is an incredibly effective channel to communicate and reassure your diners. Remember to share your most up-to-date menu and offerings, as well as highlight changes to the on-premises experience that are keeping diners safe. Also consider reaching out to your regulars with a special offer or menu-specific promotion.

We put tips like these and more in the full guide, where we also go through email marketing that resonates with diners during the pandemic, including:

How to strategically plan messaging that can adapt to unexpected changes
New campaigns to deploy today for more personalized engagement
Easy email marketing tactics to freshen up your existing content and increase impact

Download the guide here:

It’s now more important than ever to continue to build relationships with your guests to maintain their attention and loyalty.

Ready to get started with OpenTable and Emma? Our email marketing integration with Emma is available with our Core and Pro plans. Through our Open Door program, we are waiving subscription and cover fees through 2020 for any restaurant that signs up for a new plan—learn more here.

6 essential ingredients for crowdfunding a restaurant

Restaurants are some of the most capital-intensive businesses to start. Build-out and equipment costs, starting inventory, licenses, fees and working capital can easily add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. To make matters worse, banks won’t lend to new businesses and not everyone has a rich uncle. So where do up-and-coming entrepreneurs turn for much-needed capital to fuel their dreams? Crowdfunding!

Crowdfunding is a financing mechanism popularized by Kickstarter and Indiegogo, where an entrepreneur pitches their ideas online and receives pledges from backers in exchange for rewards and gifts.

Crowdfunding is not easy money. We learned the hard way by doing it ourselves. The love comes from the labor you put into to it. Here are six essential ingredients to crowdfunding a restaurant project based on our extensive experience in the field.

[Read more…]

Master your marketing: four bite-size guides and checklists to grow your business

A restaurateur’s to-do list is never-ending, and marketing might not be the top priority above everything else. But it’s an important part of running any business, and making even a small effort can make a big difference.

Beyond word of mouth, organic social media, paid campaigns, SEO, and your personal website can increase brand awareness and ultimately lead to more covers. For a bite-size digest on how to master your marketing, we’ve created four guides (and accompanying checklists) for each of these four topics so that you can learn tips, tricks, and new things to get more from your marketing efforts.

1. Maximize your restaurant’s paid marketing

Paid marketing is an effective way to promote your restaurant and spread awareness, but where should you begin? This guide breaks down what to consider when choosing a channel and how to measure a paid ad’s success. Google, Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, and OpenTable offer different opportunities to run paid campaigns, and it can be intimidating to choose a starting point. In this guide, you’ll learn the importance of booking intent, success metrics that matter, and the differences among the aforementioned platforms, plus a checklist with best practices.
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2. Generate compelling restaurant social media

Food and dining are some of the most shared and top-performing content categories on social channels, where mobile devices reign supreme and competition for eyeballs is fierce. Social media is ever-changing as it adapts to consumers’ evolving behaviors, and it’s important to stay ahead of the curve. In this guide, you’ll find tips on what to post to market your restaurant, what UGC is and how to use it, and how to take a great food picture, plus a checklist with best practices.
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3. Create an SEO-friendly restaurant website

Have you ever wondered why your restaurant doesn’t appear on the first page of Google search results? In this guide, we share why search engine optimization and Google search rankings matter. Get more familiar with what SEO is, why search rankings matter to restaurants, and how to improve your search ranking, pus a checklist of best practices.
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4. Build the ultimate restaurant website

A restaurant’s online presence is arguably just as important as its in-person environment. An attractive, easy-to-navigate website can bring your restaurant to life and give diners a preview of what to expect. In this guide, you’ll learn why your website matters, must-have website characteristics, and how to maximize your story, plus a checklist of best practices.
Read more >

Stay up to date by following us at @OpenTableRestaurants.

In demand: Dana Cowin and branding in the digital age

Every era has its hero. Dana Cowin was editor-in-chief of Food & Wine, one of the last bastions of swoon-worthy food magazine heavies, for 21 years. Over those two decades, Cowin and her team were gastronomy mile markers. They thoughtfully crafted the words and images that defined those legendary pages, inspiring a generation of curious eaters.

It’s no surprise that the woman who revolutionized how people read and learn about food and wine is busier than ever.

A Day in the Life

Cowin gets more done in a day than most people cross off in a week, and that’s just how she likes it. She is the chief brand advisor for Dig Food Group, host of the podcast Speaking Broadly, and a coach for others in the industry.

“I will sometimes begin the morning with a coaching client,” says Cowin, who consults with industry professionals eager to figure out how to make meaningful changes, just as she has in her own life. “For me, it was so hard to have the perfect job for so long and such a pain point, because I couldn’t leave until I could visualize what was next and take that leap.”

Cowin relishes devoting time to Dig Food Group, which just opened 232 Bleecker with Chef Suzanne Cupps, the chef of the celebrated Untitled. New Dig projects include openings in Philadelphia and more to come.

“Then, potentially there is lunch and putting in some time working at The Wing, where I pop in, open my laptop, and get a few emails done,” says Cowin, who supports nonprofits like the Food and Finance High School, New York City’s only culinary public high school.

In Cowin’s world, a big chunk of every perfect day would be reaching out to someone for her Speaking Broadly podcast, which airs each Wednesday for listeners on Heritage Radio Network, iTunes, and Stitcher. This spring, Cowin will also launch her own zine of the same name.

“This is one of the most exciting creative projects I’ve ever worked on, filled with people and meetings, and weekends with a week’s worth of email to catch up,” says Cowin. “I’ve been busy going out to new restaurants to see what people are eating and thinking about, so food adventures are always high on my list.”

When Cowin took over running Food & Wine in 1994, she and her team changed the magazine in a way that no one else had done before. It gave readers a different way to look at the world through the lens of food, rather than houses or fashion. Her zine aims to be of this particular moment, when food writing has become very personal.

“I like to help other people shout out broadly, pay it forward to pay it forward, and it goes to the heart of what people consider in their daily lives,” says Cowin.

Branding in the Digital Age: Staying a Step Ahead

The recent H.O.S.T. Summit + Social was founded by industry powerhouse producer Shari Bayer, the brains behind Bayer Public Relations. (The H.O.S.T. acronym stands for hospitality, operations, services, and technology.) Bayer brought her popular All in the Industry podcast to life in the inaugural event last month, when Cowin moderated a panel called “Branding in the Digital Age.”

Since leaving Food & Wine, Cowin has worked with several companies on branding projects, so she understands how the myriad digital tools available today can feel complicated and noisy to chefs and restaurateurs.

“So many chefs I know have become disenchanted with PR, believing they can do that part on their own and develop relationships one-on-one with journalists to pitch their story,” she says. “Plus, they often don’t have the budget for PR. Some of that is pragmatic and some is confidence, owning your own channels.”

To win the digital marketing race, Cowin favors the long game. But that requires vision and dedication.

“Authenticity is the starting point to any brand, because these days everyone can sniff out the inauthentic,” says Cowin. “There is so much in the world that is the same. To me, the difference between authentic and inauthentic is the difference between original personalities, not cobbled together through an algorithm.” [Read more…]

What to do after Valentine’s Day

If you’re a restaurant operator, you likely just had one of your biggest days of the year. Congratulations! Keep the momentum by carrying your Valentine’s Day success forward into the months ahead, leveraging learnings, and encouraging repeat business. First, take stock of how you did, from the hard numbers to guest feedback. Next, follow up with guests to make sure they come back. Here’s how.

Take stock of how you did

First things first: run the numbers. Pull covers and revenue data to measure the impact of the holiday. Look at the mix of party sizes, average turn times, and the pacing of seating. How did your game plan perform? Was the floor efficient? Did you have enough staff? What could have gone better?

Dig into guest and menu data. Review the books to see who dined with you on Valentine’s Day. Make note of first-time guests and repeat ones, locals and out-of-towners in guest notes. Integrate your OpenTable and POS systems to analyze the most popular and profitable menu items (from a regular or set menu) and beverages, such as cocktails or bottles of wine.

Close the loop on marketing campaigns. Restaurants using OpenTable’s marketing tracking feature can measure reservations and revenue back to digital marketing channels and campaigns. If you’re tracking already, see how many guests booked as a result of a Google Ad or email send. You can also track ROI on email campaigns with Venga. Whether you promoted a special Valentines Day menu or targeted your VIP’s to welcome them back, check in to see how many covers and how much revenue was generated directly from your email marketing efforts.(If not, be sure to set up tracking for Mother’s Day!)

Assess staff performance. Hospitality is paramount every day, but guest expectations for service are even higher on Valentine’s Day. Analyze staff performance with Venga’s Server Scorecard, which shows each server’s average feedback rating, server comparison data, and all reviews associated with that server. Identify and reward your top performers on the floor with a bonus or special shout-out, and tailor growth opportunities to each individual’s strengths and weaknesses.

Read the reviews. Pull up all the review sites where you have a presence and start reading. Notice one-off criticisms, but don’t dwell on them. Instead, focus on issues that come up repeatedly, such as wait times, an over-salted dish, or an unenthusiastic server. Venga’s Sentiment Analysis feature aggregates and analyzes reviews from across the web in one place and matches sentiments to food, service, and atmosphere, so restaurants can take action on feedback. Finally, run keyword search for “Valentine’s Day” or a specific menu item to learn about guests’ overall impression. [Read more…]

A Day in the Life

Branding in the Digital Age: Staying a Step Ahead

Take stock of how you did

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