The Email List Sitting in Your POS, Doing Nothing
David Selva · · 2 min read
Email & SMS Marketing, Restaurants, Customer Retention
Every restaurant is sitting on a list of people who already liked the food. Almost none of them ever hear from the restaurant again.
Eight years of order history. Thousands of email addresses and phone numbers from online orders, loyalty sign-ups, and reservations. Zero messages sent in the last year.
That is the most common thing I find when I open the point-of-sale system at a neighborhood restaurant. In the same conversation, the owner is usually asking me whether he should raise his Instagram ad budget to reach more new customers.
The cheapest customer to bring back is the one who already ate there and liked it. He is sitting in the system, and he hasn't heard from the restaurant since the night he paid.
A past customer is a different sale entirely
A stranger seeing an ad has to be convinced the food is good. A past customer already knows — you proved it once, at your own expense.
All she needs is a reason to think about you before she defaults to whatever is fastest to order from an app on a Tuesday night. That is a far easier message to write, and most restaurants never send it.
A campaign small enough to actually run
- One message a month with a single thing worth knowing: a new dish, a seasonal special, a slow-night deal
- A birthday message with an actual offer attached, not just the word congratulations
- A we-miss-you message triggered after 60 to 90 days of no visits, if the system can see that
None of it has to be clever. A restaurant sending one honest, useful message a month to its own customers will beat one sending nothing and hoping the ads work harder than they can.
The part that decides whether this works
It has to go out on a schedule instead of whenever there is time. A dull monthly message that actually ships outperforms a brilliant one that goes out twice a year, because consistency is the thing that turns a list into a channel.
Pick a day. The second Tuesday. It doesn't matter which one, only that it doesn't move.
Why the math is different for restaurants
Margins are thin and the profit lives in repeat visits — the fifth visit costs you nothing to earn compared to the first.
A list of past customers you aren't messaging is a zero-acquisition-cost channel sitting idle while you pay per click for strangers. That isn't a marketing strategy, that is a habit.
If your list is bigger than you thought
Go find out how many contacts are actually in your system right now. That number is the audience you have been ignoring.
Send one message to it this week before you touch the ad budget. If it turns out to be four thousand people and you would rather not be the one writing to them every month, that is the part we take over for restaurants — worth a conversation before you spend another month paying for reach you already own.