How to Make a Customer Newsletter Your Most Effective Marketing Tool

Newsletters are one of the most common forms of marketing, but also the most effective when executed well. The best print newsletters keep your business top-of-mind for your customers as no other form of advertising can, including Web sites and other types of mailers. Advocates say they build relationships with guests second only to face-to-face interaction.

The following is an excerpt from a recent Restaurant Owner.com teleseminar, during which two restaurateurs talk about why newsletters have become such a staple in their marketing mix, and share some tips and techniques to make them effective. Moderator Jim Laube talks to Jenny Cook, owner of Cook's Double Dutch Restaurant in Culver City, California, and Gina Schubert owner/operator of Maggio's in Southampton, Pennsylvania.

"I have a very small restaurant; it's 13 tables so you get about 30 seats," says Cook. "It's innovative home-style cuisine; it's open for lunch five days a week. We get a large crowd from local businesses, particularly film studios. Dinners we're open Wednesday through Sunday; we're closed weekend lunches so we don't do Saturday or Sunday brunch and we're closed Monday and Tuesday evenings."

Of her restaurant, Hubert says, "We've been around for about 30 years and we recently moved to a new location. Originally, we were just a pizza, steak and hoagie joint and we expanded over the years. Now, we've got a larger facility that has a restaurant; it's got a separate bar, it's got an Internet café, we do takeout and delivery, and we have banquet space for 300."

"Even though Gina and Jenny are many miles apart physically," Jim says, "when it comes to marketing their restaurant through a customer newsletter, they are on the same page."

Jim: How did you get the idea of doing a newsletter?

Jenny: I like newsletters; I like to write. I have not been doing it as long as Gina. I started in 2003 for my catering company, not really for my restaurant. I did catering for 21 years and the restaurant is 8 years old. We started doing a quarterly newsletter, and I noticed that I would get calls, and people enjoyed them.

I got a lot of feedback, very personal feedback from that. And then with the restaurant, I realized there was something I wasn't doing so I said, "OK, I have to learn how to market my restaurant so I too became a marketing student."

Jim: What is the tangible benefit that you see from doing your newsletter? Is there any way that you can quantify the benefits that you get from your newsletter every month?

Gina: I'm not sure I can quantify it, Jim, but I can tell you that when I missed the one month maybe three years ago, we were pretty shocked to find a drop in business. One of the reasons that you do a newsletter is to make sure people remember that you're out there.

Jenny: A proven direct marketing technique is just to get it in front of your clients' face. At night they open up [their mail] and see that [my restaurant] is there. On the side of it we always put a special or a coming event and I often see them in clients' homes on their refrigerators. The week the newsletter [is mailed], I have old clients calling me for catering jobs, telling me that they've got something coming up. When people call they want to chat.

. . . I can tell you for a fact that my response rate for my snail mail with the newsletter is so much greater than it is for any e-mail I could ever do. I do e-mail blasts all the time. I never did and never will do an e-mail newsletter. I don't think people read them. Studies show people don't read them.