According to Nation’s Restaurant News, “Restaurant marketers responded positively to Facebook’s plans to develop a “social inbox” that would aggregate users’ e-mails and separate friends’ messages from those sent by all others, including businesses.”
“Operators and social-media experts contended that the new platform, which Facebook announced last week, would not pose a threat to e-mail marketing, which is still an advertising workhorse for the restaurant industry. Rather, a ‘social inbox’ could make e-mail marketing better, they said. ‘It creates more and more pressure for good content, even with our e-mail,” said John Piccirillo, director of marketing and development for Fado Pubs Inc., parent of Fado Irish Pub and Tigin Irish Pub. ‘Gmail has its Priority Inbox now, but we haven’t seen our numbers in open rates go down with them at all. If the content is good, customers will continue to find it; how they manage it is what’s different.’ The e-mail content that has produced the best open rates recently has been “cause marketing” and philanthropic news, along with “anything that makes the customer or the staff the star,” Piccirillo said.”
