Direct Response Marketing: Why It Beats Conventional Advertising & How to Make It Work In Your Restaurant

Direct response marketing often is called "targeted marketing," which is one of the big pluses direct response has over other forms of marketing. For example, if you run an ad in your local paper or a series of ads on a radio station, you can be sure that some people who see or hear your ad will never be a customer of yours. Essentially, you are creating awareness of your business by casting a large net.

Advertising creates important visibility for startups, but its effect on putting guests in your seats is often difficult to measure. If, however, you have your own customer database and distribute a marketing message to that list, you can exercise some control over who receives your message. From an economic standpoint, you are paying to reach an audience of only those people you have chosen, such as a certain demographic or folks who have patronized your restaurant.

Advertising in magazines, newspapers, radio, billboards, coupon mailers and other marketing vehicles all have their own advantages, which should be evaluated depending on your objectives. That said, for the small, local business with a tight marketing budget, direct marketing offers several key advantages over other forms of advertising and promotion that you should understand, including:

Segmentation. You can sort your database and only send to customers in one ZIP code, for example, or only to females, or based on people's birthdays or anniversaries. Depending on how much information you gather, you could sort your database by people who have bought gift cards (if that's information you've collected). This is something to keep in mind if you're setting up your restaurant's customer database. Think about the ways in which you will want to sort the names.

Timing. If you realize it's the first week in May and you haven't done a Mother's Day mailing, you can instantly send a message to your customers via e-mail or even via the post office. Printed publications have longer lead times that make last-minute or short-term deadlines difficult if not impossible. With e-mail, you can time your message down to the minute you want it to appear in people's electronic mailboxes. And even with so-called snail mail, you can make a pretty accurate guess (well, most of the time anyway) as to when the post office will deliver a letter within your restaurant's trading area.

Mass customization. Letters can begin, "Dear Bob" or "Dear Ms. Jones." You can even get fancy and insert the person's name in the body of the message. People love to see their own names in print, and seeing a marketing piece directed just toward them gives credibility to your message.

Measurable. Direct response is measurable to a far more accurate degree than other forms of advertising. With radio advertising, for example, your restaurant traffic may increase but you have no way of knowing (other than asking each individual customer) if they are there because of your radio ads. And because your direct response piece has a "call to action" (more on that later), you will be able to measure the exact response.

E-mail or Snail Mail?

Twenty years ago, direct mail meant cutting down trees. Today, your bias may be to use the Internet whenever possible, for the simple reason of affordability. Certainly outbound e-mail marketing can be extremely cost-effective, although as we'll discuss, it is easy for your message to get lost in a sea of spam. Before you automatically dismiss regular mail, you need to consider that a typical customer of yours could get upward of 50 e-mails a day -- and some get more. That's a lot of competition for their attention, and it's easy to hit the delete button.