While Social Media is quite powerful on its own, restaurants should be able to utilize it’s power to enhance their complete marketing program. Being able to reach your customers from every communication channel is growing increasingly important and email marketing should have it’s place in your strategy.
In part 1 of this series, we’ll be talking about how restaurants can utilize social contests, promotions, and coupons to capture current customer or prospective customer emails.
Collecting Customer Emails with Social Media Promotions
We recently discussed the benefits of using Third Party apps for running social media promotions on Facebook. In my mind, one of the most convincing reasons to use an app for social media contests is their ability to require those viewing and participating to fill out a contact form.
The social promotions that we’ll touch on today are Social Coupons, Sweepstakes, and Contests.
Social Coupons: Social Media Coupons are an awesome way to reward current customers and entice your social audience to become first time customers. You can set up a Third Party App to appear on your Facebook page, and then use that link to share on Facebook, Twitter, and all over. You can even push customers in the store to check it out on Facebook. Here’s an example:
Here’s the view from the Facebook page. The Coupon App is easy to view and right on the featured apps bar.
Once customers click on the app or a link out in your social channels, they have to enter their email in order to get the coupon. Bingo.
Sweepstakes: Sweepstakes are fun and simple. Offer up something that will get your audience excited. Maybe it’s free food at your restaurant for a month. Maybe it’s a $500 Visa Gift Card. Maybe the prize is a private cooked meal for two with your chef. Just set up the app, require email signups to enter, and then pick one random email to win.
Contests: Social Media Contests take a bit more work and attention to your brand. You can set up a Customer Submitted Photo Contest or Video Contest that asks restaurant visitors to snap a picture or video of them eating your food. The option to allow voting will force more traffic to the contest and more email signups.
Final Thoughts
We love using social media promotions to gain exposure and traffic for our clients. We also get pretty excited about the boost in emails we receive through these online promotions.
If you think your restaurant is ready for something that will escalate your entire online presence, contact us and we can start brain storming your social media promotion.
