Imagine never having someone unsubscribe from your email list. Wouldn’t that be a dream?
It’s easy to fantasize about your subscribers being loyal patrons of your restaurant, who love supporting you and your business. But that doesn’t happen in real life.
Unsubscribes are part of email marketing. People unsubscribe for various reasons but mainly for the simple reason that they’re not in the market for your business. This can be a good thing, considering you don’t have to pay to have your email delivered to someone who isn’t interested in what you’re offering.
But not everyone is uninterested.
Keep in mind that while others may not be on the lookout for what your business offers, others might engage with you if only your emails were interesting. If you’re a restaurant facing the challenge of having a high unsubscribed rate (the all-industry average is 0.1%) and you want to change that – here’s a guide to help you reduce your rate, keep your subscribers hooked, and ultimately keep your restaurant thriving.
Don’t Send So Many (or So Few) Emails
How often do you send out an email to your subscribers? There’s that perfect sweet spot in the middle that allows you to stay on their minds without irritating them.
Imagine subscribing to a list that sends an email every. single. day. That would be too much for you and your inbox. To keep the peace, you’re most likely to unsubscribe. And when the reverse happened, where a business sends emails so infrequently that by the time you get an email, you’ve most likely forgotten why you even subscribed in the first place.
The sweet spot for email frequency? For restaurant businesses, it can vary to every week or once a month. Depending on the activity of your restaurant in terms of venue hiring or event bookings, you can match those with the promotions, deals, or announcements you’d like to communicate with your subscribers.
Send emails on the same day and time so they’ll know when to expect something from you.
Keep the Content Relevant to the Recipient
Segmentation is the process of sending emails only to recipients with content or topic that is interesting or relevant to them. You can send also segment customers based on past buying or dining behavior.
One thing you have to remember in email marketing is that you can keep people off the unsubscribe button if you send them something relevant. And that would mean Segmentation and Personalization.
Personalization, on the other hand, is making sure your subscribers are seen and heard. It can be as simple as including their first name on the email or sending a birthday email with a surprise coupon code on their special day.
Ultimately, your subscribers want to know that they matter to you. And that you listen to them. Make them feel special the same way you do whenever they go visit your restaurant.
Create Engaging and Irresistible Subject Lines
Your email’s subject line is your recipient’s first impression of your email. Having a boring subject line might lead to people not even opening it. If they do open it, they might not even read it and head directly to the unsubscribe button.
The key is to write compelling and irresistible subject lines to spark your subscriber’s interest and hook them in to make them want to read the rest of the email. Avoid using so many words in the subject line. Instead, keep it short and sweet with a little bit of a hint of what’s waiting for them in the email.
Make it Interesting and Entertaining
An engaging subject line might get your subscribers to open the email but if the email content itself falls short, it still might prompt people to unsubscribe.
You have to make relevant, actionable content that people will want to read.
You can hire a professional copywriter to do the job for you if writing is something you’re comfortable doing. Just make sure to keep the content as brief and as compelling as possible. You can link it out to a longer content anyway.
Do not be afraid to showcase your brand personality in your emails. It’s a great way to bridge the connection between you and your customers and to keep them away from the unsubscribe button.
Craft Easy-to-Read Emails
In email marketing, readability is a huge factor. And in this day and age, people want to easily skim through something where it makes sense. Don’t populate your email with jargon and hard-to-read words.
Some pointers to keep it readable:
- Make use of a lot of white space. Shorten your paragraphs to give the reader’s eyes a break and facilitate skimming.
- Break up text with images and make sure they are relevant to the content.
- Always make sure to include descriptions of the images for people who are visually impaired or for those who use technology to read through your emails.
- Optimize your emails for mobile. These days, everybody is on mobile. Nobody should go through a hard time zooming in or out of your emails just because they weren’t mobile-friendly.
If you want to keep subscribers, never let them feel like reading an email from you feels like a chore.
Utilize Double Opt-Ins
When people are subscribing to you, you can use a double opt-in to make sure that these people subscribing are genuinely interested in your restaurant.
By using a double opt-in, it will require people to confirm their subscription by clicking a confirmation link on their email. It’s an easy way to make sure that people who are subscribing to you, stay subscribed.
Send Test Emails
This is often overlooked by many but testing your emails gives you an advantage.
There is no sure way to predict whether something is going to resonate with your customers or not. The answer is to A/B test your marketing emails. This might be an additional process and may require you to spend a few bucks but this will help fine-tune your email marketing strategies and reduce unsubscribe rates – making sure your email hits the right spot.
Unsubscribes are part of email marketing but that shouldn’t mean you stop doing the best to keep your subscribers interested and convert them into paying customers.
