Why Don't Restaurants Focus On Email Marketing?

Is this a huge gap in how independent restaurants operate?

How many restaurants use email lists effectively? How many even have an email list at all?

It’s not zero, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be a lot.

Why not though?

Maybe it doesn’t work well for small/indie/mom-and-pop restaurants.

Maybe the effort-to-reward ratio doesn’t justify it.

Maybe restaurants lack technical or marketing expertise.

Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to it.

I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s a lot of different reasons.

But whatever it is, I doubt that a bunch of independent restaurant owners each did a strategy deep dive and said: “Ah you know what? That email thing sure sucks. Let’s deliberately exclude a marketing strategy that every single successful consumer brand uses.”

If a restaurant was a tech startup, they’d have a “Coming Soon” landing page before there was a real product, promote it to build an email list of prospective customers, build referral strategies to get your customers to generate some buzz, etc.

Why isn’t this the playbook for every new restaurant before their grand opening?

Pandemic has been tough for many restaurant businesses. Here in Chicago, we’ve seen a ton of permanent closings. But one thing I found is that a lot of the well operated ones — admittedly the well funded ones, the ones that have marketing teams, — aredoing email marketing.

And they seem to be the ones that are doing the better.