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How Email Marketing Can Grow Your Catering Business

How Email Marketing Can Grow Your Catering Business

There's no doubt about it, social media is seen as the holy grail of customer interaction and engagement in today’s marketing landscape. But, in the never-ending effort to stay connected via social networks, many companies are overlooking one crucial element of any online sales strategy: the power of email marketing.

According to The Radicati Group, worldwide email users, both business and consumer, has grown to 4 billion after 2020 and is projected to hit 4.5 billion by 2024. This shows email is still the most pervasive form of digital communication meaning massive reach potential for you.

Below are five reasons why email marketing should be a key part of your business's marketing strategy.

1) Email is better for customer acquisition

Certainly social media is a useful tool in customer engagement and it is important for retaining customers, but when it comes to attracting new customers, email marketing can be more effective in finding and converting new customers to your business. A well-crafted email marketing campaign can direct customers to your website, with the sole intention of signing up or purchasing from you, particularly if the email campaign is based around an offer or introductory discount.

2) It’s cost-effective

The actual sending of email marketing costs next to nothing. With a large database, the cost of email per person is negligible, and the results can be highly effective.

There are several inexpensive ways small and large business can grow their email database:

  • Website pop-ups for email capture
  • A homepage sidebar asking customers to sign up to your newsletter
  • Including an email opt-in button when customers place orders online
  • Running a raffle or competition where email sign up is the entry

Catering Management Systems, such as FoodStorm, can automatically collect email addresses from every order that is placed and synchronize these with email marketing software such as MailChimp.

3) You learn a lot about your customers

Effective email marketing is often managed using software programs such as MailChimp. These systems allow you to collect information on the reach and click-through-rate of every email campaign you send out.

By collecting information on how many users open your emails, and the content they’re engaging with, you’ll be able to figure out exactly what your customers are interested in. A good marketer will then use this data to form future campaigns. This will specifically target your audience and their interests, and hopefully drive some sales in the process!

4) Email is active

To open an email, people have to actively decide to click on it and engage. This means viewers are more likely to pay attention to the contents, compared to more passive media, such as Facebook, where the audience can scroll past any notification on their wall without paying it much attention.

To leverage this active engagement, and make email work for you, your email’s subject line and content must be strong enough to encourage the user to open the email and go on to interact with its contents. This comes down to audience understanding. Highly targeted and relevant emails can drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails and, by using the data insights (mentioned above) to guide your email marketing campaigns, you can ensure your readers are receiving content they’re interested in and will be more likely to buy because of this.

Another element in driving engagement with the email’s contents is personalisation. Emails that are personalized can improve click-through-rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. By taking that extra time to ensure your emails appear exclusive, personal and relevant, you can drive sales for both short and long-term results.

5) It’s everywhere

Anyone who has a mobile phone is now reachable via email no matter where they are or what they are doing. Indeed, in 2020, there were over 3.9 million daily email users! With constant connection in today's society, email is a no brainer with it comes to forming your marketing strategy.

Partner with software that shares your goals

At FoodStorm we understand the nuances of the catering industry and what it takes to make it in the digital world as a caterer. Our software was developed by caterers, for caterers.

Get in touch today to learn how FoodStorm can become a key facet to your business operations and help grow sales.

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