Let’s talk about the best restaurant marketing solutions to grow your business. I call it Marketing with a Heart! Birthdays 4 Business. Birthday Marketing for business can help you increase sales multiple ways. It is the best new customer marketing and the best promotional marketing and the best rewards program and the best digital marketing program and the best email program out there to drive in extra sales. But there is a difference in all of the methods to use birthdays 4 business.

What Is the Difference?

With all methods it is the #1 reason for someone to respond to any type of restaurant advertising or restaurant marketing. Grand openings and Going out of business are #2 and #3. This is because of the emotional connection associated with birthdays 4 business. Restaurant birthday marketing allows you to build a caring relationship with your customers that they remember and respond to with extra sales and extra loyalty. It makes them feel special if you are rewarding them for their patronage or incentivizes them to try your place vs all their other optional places to eat.

Birthday Marketing

Birthday Marketing makes your customers feel like continuing to spend money with your restaurant after their birthday as well. Think of how you feel when someone is very nice to you and identifies you by name compared to someone who is holding their hand out just asking for money and is very rude. We will gravitate toward the nice person and maybe even reward them, vs trying to avoid the non-caring person just wanting your money right. Same type of comparison can be made by using birthday cards with a genuine gift vs just sending someone a discount only to try and get a sale. Birthday cards creates a lasting impression in a good way, that they remember for a long time. I call this Personalized Branding. This is an area most operators don’t take into account when trying to tabulate return on investment from birthday marketing. Most think of responses to Happy birthday as another coupon for another one-time visit. See the difference? Birthday marketing if it’s done right creates a restaurant marketing perception that you aren’t just trying to sell them something. Rather it makes them feel like your restaurant actually cares about them besides just their wallets. They respond by wanting to reciprocate and let you know they appreciate you thinking about them. This can be the most powerful restaurant marketing and restaurant branding there is. All from one simple birthday card which has many additional benefits over digital and email birthday messages, which I’ll explain later.

Personalization

With that in mind, making sure birthday cards are personalized is very important to be most effective. It needs to be worded and the offers need to make them feel like you “really mean” that you care. To do this, offer them a genuine free birthday gift. If it’s done right, like we’ve perfected at birthdays 4 business, we can in reality make the free birthday gift equate to only about 25% to 40% off from the 1st visit only so it controls discounting. Controlled discounting is another huge benefit to utilizing birthdays as your primary restaurant marketing program because birthdays are only once a year! There are no seasonality issues for responses because of this either. The best way to have the greatest impact with birthday marketing emotionally and to enable you to reach all customer types in your target neighborhood is through Direct Mail.

Direct Mail Marketing

Direct mail marketing is more powerful than all others for birthdays because everyone has a mailbox and most check it regularly. Unlike digital marketing, the prospects don’t have to give you permission to contact them as they do with all digital marketing and email marketing. We obtain our direct mail lists from 5 different sources of national public record data so the birthday prospect names are already there! And they can be selected based on age, income and distance from your place and how many you’d like to invite to your restaurant that you can handle. It’s great to say Happy birthday on Facebook to friends and family, but when you start putting a business in front of your conversations with friends and family personal conversations, that can have a very negative perception of you. During this Corona Virus pandemic time, I think most all of us miss that personalization and companionship we have associated with going out to eat. The atmosphere, the people, we miss it all. Sure, we can all still get something to eat, but it’s usually the overall experience we really enjoy and miss right now isn’t it? This is a time when we realize the “little things” we do for each other matter and not take them for granted as much. Someone who takes the time to remember their birthday and take the time to mail a personalized card is the next closest thing to being there in person. That’s why the mailbox is so powerful and offers to much more of an emotional impact than digitally saying Happy Birthday alone. If there is a time when you can get consumers to respond to you for take-out or delivery only, it’s during their birthdays. Because most all are wanting to celebrate birthdays with their families at home since they can’t go out to eat, and many will order from you, just because they want to help your business stay solvent and grow, just as you’ve shown you care about them during the Corona Virus challenges.

In my next blog, I’d like to discuss more details about the huge benefits of using direct mail birthday marketing for restaurant marketing vs digital marketing and email marketing.