Restaurant Win-Back Offers
Something to do on a Tuesday in February. Pick the guests who stopped coming, make them one offer with an end date, and find out afterwards how many of them came.
Why it matters
Most of a restaurant's marketing runs on dates the calendar hands it. A birthday fires on a date you mostly do not have. An event needs a room, a capacity and a night somebody has to plan. Neither of those can be run on an ordinary Tuesday in February — which is exactly when a venue needs something to do and has nothing.
An offer needs none of that. It is a promise, a window and a list. The list is the part that decides whether it works, and it is the part nobody has, because building it means knowing what every guest actually did at your venue rather than owning an email address.
That list already exists here as a by-product of taking orders. Who came, how often, how recently, what they spent, whether they turned up to the last thing you ran. Nothing was bought and nothing was scraped.
Choosing who gets it
Targeting is a set of rules rather than a hand-picked list, and the rules are kept alongside the people they produced. Storing only the rules would make "who did we actually write to" unanswerable a month later; storing only the list would lose why those people. Both are kept, and both are cheap.
Hasn't been for at least so many days
The core win-back filter, and the one most venues could write down from memory but have never been able to query.
By how often they came
New, occasional, regular or lapsed — worked out from served orders rather than from a tag somebody applied once and forgot.
By minimum visits
Somebody who came twice and somebody who came twenty times are not the same audience and should not get the same sentence.
Who turned up to an event
Attendance is a stronger signal than almost anything else you hold. People who came to the last tasting are the people who will come to the next one.
Who redeemed an earlier offer
The list of people an offer actually works on. Also the list to be careful with, because they are the easiest to over-contact.
Four kinds of offer, worst to best
What you give away matters more than who you send it to, and the one every owner reaches for first is the weakest of the four.
Money off
Straight percentage or amount. It discounts visits that would have happened anyway, and it is the only kind whose cost to you rises with how much the guest spends. It is also the easiest to write, which is why it is everywhere.
A specific thing, on the house
The dessert, the first drink. It costs you an ingredient rather than a margin, it reads as more generous than a discount of the same value, and it lets you point people at something you want them to try.
Something for the whole table
Costs more as the party grows, which is the direction the incentive should point. A guest who brings three people should cost you more than one who comes alone.
Bring somebody
Conditional on a minimum party size. The only one of the four that reaches a person who is not already on your list, which makes it the only one that can grow anything.
The window is the offer
Every offer carries a start and an end, and the short one is the point. "Come back within fourteen days" and the same words with no deadline are different offers, and only one of them moves a February Tuesday. An offer that never expires is a discount you have quietly made permanent.
Each recipient gets their own code, minted when the offer is sent, and the condition travels with it — so a waiter honouring a bring-a-friend code a fortnight later sees the party size on the code rather than having to find the campaign it came from.
Nothing is applied to a bill automatically. It is a promise made in an email and honoured by a person at the table, which is deliberate: a code somebody reads out is a code somebody talks about.
What stops you overdoing it
The fastest way to lose a regular is to contact them too often, and every venue underestimates its own frequency because each message is sent by a different person for a different reason. A birthday from one place, an event invitation from another, an offer from a third, and somebody who visits monthly received three emails in nine days.
So the limit is enforced rather than intended: two contacts per guest per month, across everything. Birthdays, invitations and offers all draw from the same allowance. Consent is separate and comes first — a guest who agreed to hear about events has not agreed to receive offers, and the two are asked for individually. Marketing covers both rules in full.
Common questions
Where does the list of guests come from?
From what people did at your venue — orders, visits, event attendance. Nothing is bought and no list is imported.
Can we send an offer to everyone?
Only to guests who consented to offers specifically, and only within the frequency cap. Consent to hear about events is not consent to receive offers.
Is the discount applied automatically at the till?
No. Each guest gets a code and a person honours it. That is a deliberate choice — an automatic discount is invisible, and a code is something a guest mentions.
What happens if somebody does not use it?
The code expires with the window. You can see how many were sent, how many were opened and how many were actually redeemed.
Which kind of offer works best?
In our experience, rarely the percentage. A specific item on the house costs less and reads as more generous, and a bring-a-friend condition is the only kind that brings you somebody new.
Can we see who we wrote to, months later?
Yes. Both the rules and the resulting list are kept, so the audience is still answerable long after the segment somebody was in has changed.