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.