By Matt Plapp
In 2010, I saw an article in a marketing magazine titled “Email Marketing Is Dead.” I was worried, because I trusted the source and had so much belief in emails. I thought, “How could it be? Tell me they’re wrong.” I’d been doing emails for our business since 1999. “Please don’t tell me this is the end,” I thought.
Well, they were wrong. It’s 2024, and I’m glad to report email is alive and well.
Today, I want to discuss how your pizzeria’s email marketing is one of the pillars of your marketing plan that will keep your customers’ attention. We will cover what it takes to build a solid email marketing campaign and the emails you should be sending every month.
Related: Matt Plapp: Want to Boost Your Sales by $100,000 a Year? Here’s Where to Start
There are two types of essential marketing emails: automated and one-off. In this article, I’m going to focus on automated emails. These emails happen without you having to do anything except add people to your email database. (One-off emails are campaigns that are sent manually for specific events or promotions. We’ll explore them next week.)
In marketing your pizzeria, you have three audiences:
- New customers
- Frequent customers
- Lost customers
You have four ways to increase sales among these customers:
- Drive new sales
- Increase visit frequency
- Recapture lost customers
- Increase your customers’ spend when they visit
When building your email marketing plan, you need campaigns that attack all of these customer segments and sales levers. To do this, you should focus on the following four automated campaigns:
- Welcome email
- Reward emails
- Lost customer emails
- Sales emails
Before I show you some stats that will blow your mind, I want to walk through these campaigns.
Welcome Emails
It’s pretty simple: Welcome them with a bribe—an offer that’s so good they’d feel stupid not using it. This can’t be a coupon; it must be an incredible 100% free offer. Why? Because this is the start of your email relationship, and these customers need to know you mean business. If the first email they get from you is merely a 10% off coupon, you’ve set the tone, and they’ll be less likely to open future marketing emails.
Some of you think, “I already have their business; why give them something for free?” No, you believe you have their business. Without having a customer in your database, you are simply hoping and praying they return. By gathering their data, you now control the opportunity to bring them back. A customer’s contact information is 100 times more valuable than the free promo you give on day one.
Plus, an awesome offer gives you an opportunity for a much better sales pitch. Imagine your team member asking one of the following two questions to a customer at the register and tell me which one lands harder: “Hey, want to join our email program and get 10% off your next order?” Or: “Hey, do you want a free appetizer on your next visit? Of course you do. What’s your email?”
Words matter; the better your pitch, the more confident your team will be when delivering it to your customers.
Reward Emails
These emails will hit harder with your top customers, the ones in your loyalty program. Birthday promos, rewards unlocked with points earned, etc., are key to keeping you top-of-mind with your best customers and gamifying their experience.
Lost Customer Emails
COVID should have taught us how important having customer information is. So many customers went missing during this time due to working from home, changing driving patterns, etc. Every restaurant has thousands of customers who aren’t visiting due to them simply forgetting. A program tied to email marketing that knows this and reaches out on autopilot is gold.
In fact, here’s proof of this at an extreme level. Click here and skip to 21:42 to see how my Lamborghini caused me to stop visiting my favorite wing joint. I’ve been eating there for 20 years, and I stopped for three months by accident!
Sales Emails
You’ve gathered all of this data and spent money on getting it, so why not use it to sell stuff? Right? These are the emails where you go right to the point: Walk in here and eat some food this week.
Now, on to the proof. Let’s look at what’s possible. Below are the stats for one of our clients over six months, from May 2024 to November 2024.
Across all of these campaigns, they saw 1,657 redemptions of email promotions for $128,507 in gross sales.
With regard to open rates and redemption rates, you’ll typically see diminishing returns the lower you go on this chart. People are more excited initially, and the farther away you get from their signup and engagement, the lower rates will go. You must study the numbers, make tweaks and constantly find ways to improve the results.
As you’ll see, this client drives email engagement and, more importantly, sales across all customer segments and in each possible sales category. Plus, these emails reach customers who’ve forgotten them and encourage others to spend more.
The lost customer campaign was able to save 476 customers who had stopped visiting the restaurant. When you look at the sales associated with those customers, that’s “incremental sales,” meaning it would not have happened without this campaign. And when you factor in your only cost, the food cost, these simple campaigns brought in $16,660 in profit.
The sales campaigns are similar in driving incremental sales and profits. These campaigns rewarded customers with bonus loyalty points for visiting in a particular week and spending $10 more than usual. This forced customers to spend more on their visits and interrupted their pattern. In this case, these customers accounted for $7,529 in incremental profit.
You’ll also notice the terrible redemption rate of 1% on the sales campaigns, because too broad of an audience was used on these campaigns. This should be closer to 5%.
Next week, we’ll explore one-off email campaigns in more depth and review how to gamify them to improve Facebook post engagement.
My name is Matt Plapp. I’m the CEO of America’s Best Restaurants. I’ve worked with thousands of restaurants since 2008 when I started this company, and over the next 12 months, we will help 2,500-plus restaurants with their marketing. This is the latest article in a new weekly column for PMQ to help restaurant owners understand the gold mine we have to market in 2025—and beyond.
Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at PMQ.com on December 17, 2024. It has been reposted here as a featured article in the May 2025 issue of PMQ Pizza.
