Is Email the Secret Sauce of Marketing for Restaurants?

Food is serious business. Now, on The Main Course, host Barbara Castiglia will invite insiders on the front lines of food to share their expertise, strategies, and forecasts for navigating the ever-changing restaurant industry.

While becoming a favorite local hotspot and enjoying the perks of word of mouth marketing is likely every restaurant owner’s dream, most know that it takes a lot of business and marketing savvy to keep a restaurant fully booked. Which is why Barbara Castiglia wanted to learn more about the intersection of restaurant financing and restaurant marketing. Castiglia tapped Johann Moonesinghe, Founder and CEO, inKind, a unique restaurant financing engine that’s already helped more than 460 restaurants throughout the world, to shed some light on this topic.

While it’s hard to distill years of expertise down into a quick podcast episode, Moonesinghe was able to share some key marketing tips for restaurant owners. One such tip being to utilize email marketing. Moonesinghe feels that most restaurants don’t do a great job with email marketing. “Email marketing is actually in our experience, probably the best form of marketing that a restaurant can and should be doing. It’s just hard to do, because how do you gather email addresses that are customers? And then you can’t just gather them, you have to engage with them, because that’s how you build that rapport through email with your customers,” Moonesinghe explained. When his team begins working with a restaurant, ramping up their email marketing efforts is something they really focus on. “So we will gather email addresses from people who go to their website, we’ll engage with those people, we’ll let them know about new menu items that are coming out, and we’ll let them know about the new patio hours, or the COVID hours,” Moonesinghe explained.

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