Email marketing software may not make your food taste better, but what it will do is help pack your tables and fill your reservation sheet. In the ferociously competitive food services industry, it is imperative that you market your establishment to ensure that patrons are regularly eating at your restaurant. But, for many restaurant owners, they just can't compete with the million dollar marketing budgets of major national chains. There is, however, a new weapon in the arsenal of restaurant owners that helps level the playing field. That new tool, which restaurant owners around the nation are flocking to, is simple and effective email marketing software.

By harnessing the power of email marketing software, restaurant owners can easily execute professional email marketing campaigns with just a few clicks. The days of hiring expensive designers or incurring costly printing fees for a traditional flyer campaign are all (thankfully!) a thing of the past.

Restaurants of all types have started realizing the value of collecting customers' email addresses, so that they can later follow-up with them and try to bring them back into the restaurant for yet another meal (…and bring their friends to!). From fast-food to fancy upscale restaurants, asking for your customers email address in a comment card on the table or a signup sheet by the cash register is no longer the least bit intrusive and is the first step towards powering your email marketing initiative. While your restaurant may not develop a massive contact database overnight, after a couple weeks of aggressively collecting contact information, you will have enough data to load into your email marketing software and to start reaping the results.

Most email marketing software solutions will let you easily add your contacts online. In addition, the top tier email marketing software programs will let you segment your list into different groups. With this ability, you can separate your contacts by time of day (for example, lunch time customers vs. dinner customers) so that later you can run a finely-tuned targeted email marketing campaign.

Once you have built your restaurant contact list (which is an on-going process) you can begin toyou're your creative and marketing juices run wild as you prepare to launch an email marketing campaign. Part of the reason that email marketing software is so effective in the food services industry is because it lets the restaurant reach out and communicate with past customers in a one-to-one setting right in their inbox, away from the clutter of other mass medium platforms.

Restaurants can run all sorts of promotions using simple and effective email marketing software. One of the most popular tactics is to send out an email marketing campaign with a coupon (often referred to as an "ecoupon"). The offer can range from a certain percentage off the customer's meal, a free desert, or anything else that the restaurant owner thinks will entice people to come in for another serving. Some crafty restaurant owners even create ecoupons where the recipient has to bring a friend with them to redeem the offer on the coupon. This is an effective email marketing strategy because the restaurant is encouraging both repeat business and new business at the same time. And, of course, the new customer (the ‘friend') can sign up to join the restaurant's mailing list, so he or she can also receive these special email marketing ecoupons in the future.

Email marketing software can also be used to announce new menu items, special events, catering options and more. Since the people receiving the restaurant's email have presumably already had a positive experience at that establishment, the email marketing campaign serves as a tool to keep the restaurant name on the customer's radar. After all, the more the restaurant can keep its brand in front of the customer, the more likely that restaurant is to be the answer to the question: "Honey, where do you want to go for dinner?"

With email marketing software, every restaurant can gain a competitive edge without needing to break the budget. And, in this day and age, where every restaurant is vying for the same customer's dollar, any sort of edge is a very good one, especially when it helps level the playing field between the big national chains and the smaller independent restaurants.