Running a sports bar or restaurant is incredibly stressful. There’s never enough time to get everything done and you’re constantly confronted by surprise challenges. A typical reaction to this stress is to shortcut some elements of your business’s needs. An easy target of this calculated negligence is the marketing of your restaurant.

While that may be typical, it is also self-destructive.

Restaurant traffic has been falling and locations closing. Simply put, you can’t afford to forget to market your business. While there are no “zero work” alternatives to short-changing your marketing, there is a way to largely automate the most effective method you can access — email!

The solution is working with an email marketing provider that supplies access to automated processes called workflows.

Generic Email Service Clients Don’t Serve the Restaurant Industry

Frustrated Sports Fans at a sports bar

These workflows do the base work of sending birthday invites or welcoming someone to your email mailing list. They can also be used to do sophisticated promotions that you might not be able to manage with the workflows. Your first question is likely, ” Where do I find email marketing with automated workflows?”

Certainly, you can look to providers like Constant Contact or Mail Chimp, but you will find their automations are limited and expensive. However, and most importantly, they are not relevant to our industry. Yes, they have some restaurant templates, but they are so generic as to be almost useless.

Alternatively, providers like Main Street Hub or PopMenu do understand some things about the restaurant industry. However, they are still also generic for most restaurants and, in some cases, they take control of your subscribers and never give you independent access to them. That’s a big red flag.

A fan in a yellow shirt with the SportsTV Guide HQ logo on it and a foam #1 finger. Text reads, Finally, email marketing built for sports bars.

STVG HQ Brings the Power of Email Workflow Automation the Restaurant Industry

Screengrab from SportsTV Guide HQ of email marketing workflow automations for sports bars

At SportsTV Guide HQ, we understand the power of workflow automation, because we do it professionally with our SportsTV Guide and Daily Rail services.

Our knowledge related to automated workflows, coupled with our understanding of your guest marketing needs, led us to build our own sports bar specific email marketing system complete with workflow automations among many other features.

How Workflow Automations Can Make Sports Bar Marketing Easy

Football fans celebrating while watching a game at a sports bar

Now that we’ve convinced you that workflow automations will reduce the time required to drive your marketing, we need to identify what these processes can deliver.

Here are just a few more ways you can automate your marketing to make it more effective and drive actual traffic.

Recurring Campaigns:

  • Welcome Emails to new subscribers with a visit offer
  • Specific event invitations like promoting your local team or fan club’s upcoming game, can also include a visit offer
  • Birthday reward, sent annually to every registered guest with visit offer

Data Collection/Personalization/Gamification:

  • Polling for favorite team or sport
  • Pre-built relevant promotions for events like March Madness, Weekly Football Cards or World Cup that engage guests over a longer time frame.
  • Personal information like their birthday or favorite menu item

Communicate:

  • Weekly newsletter with schedule data for upcoming featured games to drive traffic
  • Limited time offer (LTO) campaigns that run when you specify and is sent to whomever you want to receive
  • Current promotions or special offers prepped and ready to send

With STVG HQ, you won’t have to figure out how to build, maintain or deploy workflow automations because we pre-build them and give you simple tools to manage your marketing.

If you are ready to truly upgrade your email marketing let us deliver you a demo so you can see just what we’ve built with sports bar operators in mind. You can schedule a free demo by emailing us or filling out the form on the STVG HQ page.

BONUS: Special Offer to STVG Subscribers

Now through the end of the 2024, SportsTV Guide Subscribers can get UPGRADED Concierge Level marketing service (a $3600/year value) at Pro level pricing of just $150/month for 2500+ contacts. This includes your STVG subscription! Plus:

  • Complete technical setup, including migration of your email templates and contact list
  • Unique newsletter and single-send email template designs, exclusive to your brand
  • Base email campaign and design setup (birthday, reward programs, etc.)
  • Email marketing planning meetings with the STVG HQ staff
  • Prebuilt sports-themed promotions (March Madness, Weekly Football Cards, etc.)
  • Content creation for your email marketing and social campaigns

To learn more about STVG HQ and to schedule your free demo to see it action, visit here.