On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest, how would you rank the deliverability rate of your restaurant email marketing?

Deliverability often doesn’t get a 10—either in importance or performance—because many digital marketing gurus often think deliverability ends with clicking the send button. Yet there is much more to it than that, and business owners have much to be gained by both learning more about deliverability and taking steps to continuously improve it in order to improve your restaurant email marketing.

The Difference Between Emails Sent and Emails Delivered

Let’s start with a common misconception: the difference between emails sent and emails delivered. An email marketer might send to a list of 50,000 and see in his or her email analytics that 93% of those emails were “delivered” to the list of potential customers according to the ESP.

However, that does not mean 93% reached the subscribers’ inboxes. The number of emails in marketing campaigns that actually make it to inboxes is known as the Inbox Placement Rate (IPR) and it’s a much more accurate measurement to study when email marketing for restaurants.

According to 250ok’s Global Deliverability Benchmark 2019 report, IPRs have been up and down although it hovers at around 80%:

The IPR is the important email metric

It’s only the emails that make it into your customers’ inboxes that count!

Why is Email Deliverability So Hard for Restaurant Marketers?

For a better understanding of the discrepancy between the emails you successfully manage to send vs. the emails you successfully manage to deliver, let’s consider all the restaurant email marketing hoops you have to jump through to get to that inbox:

1. First, you have to have a valid email address.

2. Second, your email message must get past the gateway that is the ISP or corporate email filter.

3. Next, it has to get past the recipient’s spam filter.

4. Then that email has to avoid the junk mail folder.

5. Finally, it has to actually get into the recipient’s inbox.

And that’s not all! Once your email finally gets into the inbox, the recipient needs to actually open the email, but more on that later…

Before you jump through hoops: Here are the Two Parts of Email Deliverability

That’s quite the list of hoops you have to jump through. And before that even happens, before you hit send and start “jumping,” there are two aspects of email deliverability that need to be mastered first (and the second one is often ignored).

1. The technical part: Some of the technical aspects are handled by your ESP as they strive to keep their own deliverability rate as high as possible, including feedback loops with domains and authentication. For the sender, the technical aspects also include careful ramping up of new IP addresses and clean HTML code. These are kind of like the nuts and bolts of your email deliverability, the machine part, if you will.
2. Content & More: The other aspect is a little less cut and dried, and it’s where your role as the sender or publisher comes into play. Although the technical aspects of email deliverability are crucial, they are only part of the process of reaching the inbox. The content you create and send, the frequency and cadence of your sends, the way you either consider or disregard your subscribers, the testing and optimizing you do (or don’t do)…all of these affect your email deliverability as well, because they affect the actual engagement of the people you are emailing, ideally helping to ensure your emails are engaged with. Yes, you want to drive traffic to your restaurant, but it starts with your email engagement.

Restaurant Marketing Strategies Are Challenging

The challenge is, many email marketers are focused on the technology and think that’s enough to get emails into the inbox. But it’s not. Domains like Gmail are looking for subscriber engagement. It’s hard for a restaurant email marketer to understand, but you don’t get awarded inbox placement without doing the second part.

That is due in part to a lack of knowledge. Email marketing is a strange field, and perhaps it’s even stranger when it’s restaurant email marketing. It’s not as if college students are lining up to declare themselves Email Marketing majors. Usually those on the restaurant email team come from some other job and get on-the-job training. With all of the intricacies and complexities of successful email marketing, it’s no surprise that there is much email marketers don’t know.

Then there is the lack of time. People are busy, restaurant email marketers especially. They are rushing to get campaigns out the door, and think they lack the time to even do an A/B test. But without a focus on content and optimizing that content, email deliverability can’t improve…and might even decline.

Incremental Improvements Add Up in Restaurant Email Marketing

And you need those incremental improvements, plus those little movements forward can give you a competitive edge. For example, whether it’s due to lack of knowledge or lack of time, I would estimate up to 80% of email marketers are not optimizing their subject lines, let alone the preheader text or the body text, probably because they think what they have is “good enough.” Good is the enemy of great, remember? Optimizing just one aspect, like the subject line, could make a huge difference.

Because you benefit from even the tiniest improvement. If there’s an A/B split test and the one subject line performs 3% better than the other subject line, an uneducated email marketer might assume that’s a negligible difference that really doesn’t matter. They’d be wrong.

If 3% more recipients open the email with the better subject line, that incremental improvement adds up. For one thing, that means 3% more people actually saw the content and had the option of acting on it. Opening an email shows engagement, and engagement improves your sender reputation and therefore deliverability rate, possibly getting you into even more inboxes. And every email that gets opened gives you that many more chances for a click through and conversion—and restaurant customers. You won’t have an overnight improvement, but you might have a long-term gradual one.

When it comes to email deliverability, the technical aspect will only take you so far.

Choosing The Right Email Service Provider Can Make Up for a Lack of Time and Expertise

If your restaurant email team suffers from a lack of knowledge or a lack of time or both, choose to work with an ESP that can help you improve your “softer” side of the email deliverability equation.

An ESP like iPost, which specializes in Restaurant marketing, for example, offers automated testing, with the winning email being the one that is sent out on your behalf. An ESP can also educate your team, for a better understanding of how your actions as a sender are working for or against your Inbox Placement Rate.

Your email deliverability should be a 10.

Download this Complete Guide to Restaurant Email Marketing today.

This helpful guide offers the following for free:

• Successful tactics in restaurant & franchise email marketing

• Effective emails for restaurants and bars and why they work

• How to choose the best restaurant email marketing software

• 15 restaurant newsletter campaign examples