Eatout-Sydney - New Restaurant Listings

Hi Everyone! Great to be back in the swing of things after a week off down the South Coast. We've had a busy month and I'd like to take the opportunity to introduce you to the new restaurants being showcased on Eatout-Sydney. As always, we're excited to be growing so quickly, and extremely grateful to the restaurant owners who are putting their trust in us to help grow their businesses. It won't be long until Eatout-Sydney reaches the 100 restaurants mark - watch this space!

Demand is high for our services so if you know of restaurants that need more customers in the door, need a great website or just want to become more profitable or save on marketing costs, send me an email with their contact information and I'll give them a call immediately!

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Eatout has also been growing in other Australian cities including Perth, Adelaide, and Brisbane. So if you're ever travelling interstate, then you can rest assured that you'll always be able to make informed decisions with all the information you need to decide where to dine, wherever you are.

Now, onto the list of new restaurants in Sydney. Simply click on the links below to find out all about these amazing restaurants and make sure you try them out! Remember - the sensational food photos you see are of the actual food you'll be served, and if that doesn't excite you I don't know what will! You can also view all their menus, see their specials, and even book online if you like. I don't know about you, but this is all making me feel hungry!

Amata Thai Cuisine in Newtown, Sydney

Saigon Bay Restaurant in Darlinghurst, Sydney

Pent Thai in Epping

Cibo e Vino in Castle Hill

Luka's Restaurant in Balgowlah

Fusion Cafe and Restaurant in Marsfield

Ranange Thai in Rozelle

Iyara Thai in Gladesville

Kens Charcoal BBQ Restaurant in Carlingford

The above restaurants are all waiting to see you in their restaurants. When you go, make sure you mention that you found their restaurant on Eatout-Sydney - the place where Australian look online for restaurants.

Until my next post - live life like there's no tomorrow!
Fenwick Snowdon
Eatout-Sydney

The Power of Outstanding Website Photos

Visually powerful hospitality websites are hard to find. I know - I'm always looking for them! Too many websites put photos in as an afterthought, featuring often poor quality images of their food that can actually have a negative effect on business. Additionally, these photos (whether good or bad) are buried in the depths of a website instead of where they should be - on the home page giving potential diners immediate reasons to visit your restaurant. Your website only has a few seconds to convince new diners to pick up the phone to book a table, and these diners have no time to waste searching for information that can help them make a decision. If they don't get it immediately, they'll go elsewhere.

And yet, when done properly, outstanding photos of your food and premises, placed strategically on your website and in other places on the Internet can create such a powerful effect on sales that it really should be an essential part of your online marketing strategy.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle is the perceived expense of getting professional photographs in the first place. But, when considering the amount of diners these 24/7 strategies can generate, the initial costs are soon justified. And professional photographers's rates very considerably, from less than $200 to over $2000, and you don't have to hire the most expensive.

Here are just a handful of uses great quality images can be used for:

1. own website
2. Flicker
   
3. your blogs
4. Facebook
5. front window (in an electronic photo frame or printed copies of your food in a lightbox)
6. email marketing
7. other traditional marketing (e.g. flyers)

If you'd like to learn more about our services, including photography services, simply email me with your contact details and I'll get back to you within 24 hours.

Five Essential Website Elements

With over 63% of diners using the internet to find a place to dine, hospitality websites are now more important than ever. Not only do you have to have one, it has to look great, be easy to navigate around, and achieve it's overall goal - to attract new diners to your restaurant. This latter goal is often overlooked.

This sounds so simple, but more often than not hospitality websites lack certain essential elements which results in desired outcomes not being met.

Here are five essential website elements to get you off to a flying website design start:

• Name, address, phone number (so people can contact you)
• Printable navigation map (so people can find you)
• Menus - up-to-date (so people can see your food and prices)
• High quality food photography preferably in a slideshow format (to get people to take action and phone you)
• Opening times (so people know when you open)

Eatout-Sydney designs websites for hospitality businesses, hosts a powerful online restaurant dining guide, helps restaurants build customer databases and provides advice on the best ways to market to that database. If you'd like to learn more about what Eatout-Sydney can do for your hospitality business, please email me your contact details, including landline number and mobile phone details and I'll be in touch shortly.

How to Build a Customer Database

I'm constantly surprised at the number of businesses that neglect to collect contact information and feedback from their customers. Afterall, without customers, there is no business.

The last three months have really hit home for many restaurants - I'm often being told by restaurant and cafe owners that they don't know where their customers have gone. For most of these restaurants, they have no way of contacting their customers again and they can only hope that their customer base starts to return.

At the other end of the spectrum, I meet owners who are diligently sending emails to their customers on a regular basis, informing them of special offers or upcoming events to encourage them back to their restaurants. If you had the choice, which position would you rather be in? It's a no-brainer isn't it, and it really hits home the most when times start to get hard.

The good news is, it is never too late to get started, and these days, there is plenty of help at hand to guide you through the technical stuff so that you can be producing great looking email campaigns that bring customers to your door. If the above hasn't convinced you yet, here are a few more reasons to start building a database and emailing your customers:

• Your customers want you to email them (they wouldn't have given you their details if they didn't want to hear from you!)
• You can offer your very best customers the best offers first, making them even more loyal
• Email marketing returned over $48 for every dollar invested in 2007 across all industries - there is no more cost effective way to market to your customers
• The return on investment of email marketing is easy to measure (unlike space advertising like newspaper and radio, which are expensive and almost impossible to measure unless you coupon your way to bankruptsy)
• It acts as an extension to word of mouth advertising by giving existing customers another great way to tell people about your business
• It is quick and easy to do - and it's not about discounting
• It increases the value of your business

Although it might seem daunting, building a customer database and then emailing your customers can be every easy. If you want to learn how to start building a database of customers quickly and efficiently, or already have a database but don't have the software to really make the most of database marketing, then email me now to find out more.

Develop a Powerful Answerphone Message

How many of you have a powerful answerphone message that forms part of your integrated marketing strategy? Remember, for many diners, the answerphone message is the first contact they may have with a restaurant they are considering dining at. And yet many restaurants simply don't have a message at all, or it lacks a call to action.

This hit home last week when I visited a restaurant owner. During our meeting, the phone rang 6 times, and four times, as soon as the person had listened to the message, they hung up without leaving a booking. That's a potential loss of business of more than $400 for this restaurant alone in the space of 2 hours!

If you have a great website (remember, it must really showcase your restaurant so that it builds trust in potential diners), then why not direct callers to your website in the first instance? This is very effective for people phoning and wanting instant information on functions or catering. If you direct these inquiries to your website, you are giving them the opportunity to find out more about you and your products immediately, without having to wait for you to phone back. They are also less likely to look elsewhere for the solution they are looking for.

If you have online booking on your website, even better - they can find out all about you and book online!

Here are three potential phone messages you could use today to improve your marketing overall:

Message one:
Thank you for calling [restaurant name].

Our trading hours are [trading hours].

If you wish to make a booking, you can do so after the beep. Or if you’d like to make a booking online, please visit our website on [www.websitename.com.au], where you can also view our menus, photos of our food and premises, function information and lots more.

Thank you once again for calling.

Message two:
Hi, thanks for calling [restaurant name]. Sorry we can’t take your call right now – you can hold and leave a message, or you can go online to [websitename.com.au] to see our menus, map, opening hours, photos and function options. You can even book a table on line if you like.

Message three:
Hello, and thank you for phoning [restaurant name]. We’re sorry we can’t take your call personally right now. If you’d like to find out more about us visit our website on [www.restaurantname.com.au]. You’ll be able to view our menus, photos of our food and premises, even information about functions and parties, and lots more.

You can even book a table online if you wish [optional].

Alternatively, if you’d like to leave a booking or a message by phone, please do so after the beep. Please remember to leave your name and contact details and we’ll be in contact very shortly.
Thanks once again for contacting us. We look forward to seeing you in the near future.

If you'd like to learn more about how to build an outstanding website for your restaurant, and really supercharge your marketing efforts, please phone (02 98888 440) or email us at any time.

Welcome to our blog

Hello to all our Eatout-Sydney subscribers, and welcome to our blog! I'm excited that Eatout-Sydney has grown so much in the last 7 months and for this I want to thank you for your trust and support. We now have 70 restaurants and cafes using our services to attract new diners to their venues. And demand only seems to be getting stronger!

A lot has happened behind the scenes in those 7 months since Sydney became the first Eatout dining guide in Australia. We've now opened in Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide. Malaysia is also up and running and our New Zealand site is as strong as ever. We've well and truly moved beyond being simply another Sydney dining guide.

Even more exciting is the product development itself. We're really moving away from just being an online restaurant dining guide and are positioning ourselves as a one-stop-shop for restaurant marketing. Central to this move is our emphasis on marketing integration. Too many restaurateurs simply have a website built and then park it, excluding it from all their other marketing efforts. Unfortunately, this approach doesn't work and the end result is a website that doesn't serve its purpose and only costs you money.

But websites that really showcase a restaurant, are easy to navigate around, and provide complete information on a restaurant can be a powerful marketing tool. When you start to integrate your website with your other marketing, results can skyrocket!

Over the next few months I'll be posting a series of simple ways you can all improve the return on investment your website is currently earning you (or costing you), along with other great marketing ideas. I'll also be keeping you updated on important things like Google ranking status and some of the other things we're doing to improve your results.

Thank you once again for your support.