More Customer Traffic
Short Lessons from SgShopper.me
The e-Magazine As A Marketing Medium
Lesson 1
Reading Time about 3-minutes
We have arrived in a digital age, and while print has its place, it is much less expensive to produce an Internet or Electronic Magazine that brings YOUR OFFER to customers.
E-magazines are an ideal medium with the ability to bring exposure and customers to restaurants and merchants.
The e-magazine can be changed any time. If there’s a mistake, or necessary change the work can be done without delay, and often at very low cost. Compare this to print (ink on paper.) Once the paper is released to the public what is there is permanent. If you accidentally told the world you are open until 2 AM but meant 2 PM, you’re stuck now with this problem you have created. But with an electronic magazine, you can call and the change can be made instantly.
E-magazines can link a small ad to a bigger “Landing Page” or a single-page website all housed within the e-magazine. The Single Page Website can be expanded into 3 or 5 pages for relatively low cost and all of it hosted within the e-magazine reducing your cost and the myriad troubles that are involved in producing and publishing websites.
Additionally, the “magazine” can be seen on a desktop PC, Lap Top computer, a cell phone, or a tablet phone. A lady standing on a sidewalk can look up the advertiser she wanted to visit on her phone, and even be directed there with an online map! No one in the recent past had such convenience, and it’s certainly not available in print.
More….the web page can contain a short video movie. Show your line of clothing or the interior of your restaurant or a 3-minute conversation with the Chef. No print magazine can do that.
Merchants, Cafes, and Restaurants can take the best advantage of a magazine’s niche audiences, reaching interested people at the time they are ready to buy. Your ad is not wasted on someone who doesn’t eat out, or can’t afford the cost of dining out.
As an example: A lady on the sidewalk meets a friend, they do some shopping and then one says, “Where can we go to eat?” They look through www.SgShopper.me magazine for restaurants and cafes and find an alphabetical list of all advertisers therein, or look at a grid of advertising cafes and click on several that sound good. They make a choice, a map can be available. They can phone in to ask questions and arrive at the café they wanted, all of it taking place in an office or standing together on the sidewalk. It’s just amazing what new technology can do for us in Singapore!
We can reach the Dining-Out public any minute of the day or night and the advertisement is always clean, crisp and “just like new.”
Compare this to, for example, television and radio shows. In that medium, you pay much more to reach a huge audience, and most of them have no interest and are too far away to even consider coming to you. The ad comes on in the middle of the show and your intended audience gets up to go to the washroom! Your advertising dollars are being washed down the drain!
Being able to advertise to specific audiences also allows for the business manager to inform a current audience of a new product, a sale, a special offering for this weekend or the upcoming Holiday.
Place an ad to appear in Exciting Dining Weekend Edition and it appears on Wednesday, in time for everyone to plan the weekend. The ad is seen from Wednesday morning until Sunday night or very early Monday morning. It’s instant, it’s inexpensive, it reaches the right people in the right place at the right time, and then it vanishes. The café or restaurant manager made his/her special offer, gained more customer traffic and the offer vanishes on Sunday night. What can be better?
E-Magazines allow for fine color reproduction, which enhances and makes an advertisement appear more vibrant. That never happens with a newspaper ad. The newspaper gets wet, crumpled, ugly, leaves newsprint on hands and clothing, and is simply undesirable. It’s usually thrown away within 1 to 3 days. But the e-magazine article is neat and clean and is available any time the reader has decided, “This is the day. This is the right hour to do business.” There’s nothing to store and carry. The website is available anytime.
E-Magazines also have a high “pass along” value through social media and email. Friends tell friends and before long a special event at a hotel Chinese Restaurant can be known to the entire Singapore Chinese Community! What would YOU like to tell them? Perhaps you’ll announce a wedding or a newly born baby. Friends can send the link to the article and suddenly everyone is sending the link to ten friends. This is impossible with print but is a normal daily occurrence with a website magazine. Present your desire. I’ll happily open a Society Section and add a linking headline for this purpose.
www.SgShopper.me is FREE. Everyone is welcome to see it. There’s no request to subscribe or sign in. Just go to www.SgShopper.me/ and it opens. Click on a link to Restaurant and Café listings and every advertiser becomes immediately available. This helps customers who know your name. But, if they don’t know where to visit, the small display section will draw the eye and help the prospective customer find you! The magazine is extremely easy to navigate.
E-Magazines provide an obvious audience and are always up-to-date, stylish, and “trendy.”
Restaurants, Cafes, Hotels, and Merchants realize there is no other medium that so perfectly creates and fits a market audience and gets so much return for their advertising investment.
Singapore has no other medium that can do for your business what Singapore Shopper E-Magazine can do. The need has been unfulfilled for a long time. Now, we’re making headway to bring you more customer traffic and you’ll have an inexpensive way to bring in more customers and earn more money.
See a sample of Exciting Dining Weekend Edition HERE
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Getting More Customer Traffic Can Be Easy
Lesson 2
Reading time 2-minutes
In these next days, you’ll be seeing, or receiving via email, short tips to help you, and often the cost to implement them is nothing or “minimal.” These are drawn from many authors interested in, and writing about, Restaurant Management and Café/Restaurant promotion. I’ve done the research for you and intend to continue to do so as it is part of my work to treat you as if I am a consultant.
You’re not simply “a customer.” You are a client in my thinking, and I am your advertising and marketing “coach.” This is the sort of service you get from the most expensive ad agencies, but I don’t have to be overpriced. I want you so pleased you’ll stay with me. Your business, life, and family, are important to me. I want you to remain prosperous.
I don’t “use” people so I can make a living. That’s a path to self-destruction! I help business operators prosper as we all work together to benefit one another and all of Singapore. To do less leads to hating yourself and your work, and losing your self-respect. When you do honorable work and please your customers they continue to return and you enjoy satisfaction with your work and your life. The young Americans think only of themselves. The elders know to put You First in their life and they trust the income flow will take care of itself.
These understandings are what made Singapore the greatest city in the world, and we must not “lose sight” of it.
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Lesson #2
The Basic Website or Landing Page Design Structure:
Reading time under 2 minutes
Keep Your Web Message Clean, Simple,
and Easy To Read
Another author agreed with me, that most restaurant websites are too complicated. There’s little justification for paying a huge price for many pages. In most cases, 1 to 3 pages can be quite sufficient. Keep the site easy to understand. Big photos are very helpful. Food photography is a specialty of photography and when you can, hire a photographer who does a lot of that work. If you don’t know one ask me. I am doing my best to find one as of this writing. I can refer you to the photographer. He/she will call you.
The ONE Page should show your contact information at the top or bottom. If you require reservations there, in the contact information, is where that phone number belongs. If you arrange takeaway delivery there too is where the numbers and information should be placed.
Avoid automatic music playing, rotating photos, (several shown on “a slider”) because these elements demand more Internet bandwidth and slow your page loading down. If a page becomes very slow readers will leave and look elsewhere.
Advertising agency studies have proven the best background is white or an off white. The best font is similar to this one with serifs which create a “track” that guides eys to see along the length of the sentence easily. Use #0000 BLACK color, not “automatic” which is a gray-blue and disappears for older eyes. If they can’t read it, they won’t buy. I recommend 14 point type size or larger. You’re looking at Black color type, “Georgia” font in 14 point type. I will be experimenting with softer “off white” color backgrounds, but nothing “radical.” Just soft enough to reduce glare.
Many “Web Designer” shops are run by young people with good eyesight. They’ve never learned any eye physiology characteristics of older eyes, nor have they studied advertising writing to learn what works and what kills sales! They unwittingly waste MILLIONS of dollars per year worldwide.
Maybe they secretly want to be movie makers. We’re not in the movie business. We’re in the Sales Business. We “sell” the idea that customers should visit You!
A “beautiful” website by my definition is one that is easy to read and easy to navigate with photos large enough to draw attention and entice the viewer to visit you to see, smell, buy, taste, or pick up and use what he or she saw on the web page.
If I build a beautiful web page or site for you, my purpose is to draw more customers through your door or get them to call! I am your inexpensive salesman in print and I’m all over Singapore!
I have been studying this information and applying it face-to-face and online in sales work for many years. Ad Agencies often say good salespeople make the best “ad copy” writers. Often they hire a salesperson to rework a “male order sales” presentation and then they rewrite and test the publication again based upon his recommendations. I am one of those salesmen who also wrote and tested ad copy most of my adult life. Now, writing ad copy is what I do. I earned awards in Seattle for most sales in the district when I was selling on my feet and now I intend to bring what I’ve learned to help you.
The next tip will help you further. Thanks for reading.
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Restaurant Marketing/ Lesson 3
Reading time less than 2 minutes
SHARED CULTURE
What does branding have to do with your life and work? I contend it has little or nothing to do with your life, and attempting to brand yourself and your business name everywhere is a big mistake.
You’re not trying to be a Coca Cola or a Pfizer. If you are you will not succeed because there’s no one in Africa or Moldova planning to come to dine with you.
Branding for YOUR business should be for your community and for Singapore, and not further. That’s why I said in my first promotional information letter that buying advertising on big broadcast radio or television is a huge waste of money.
“One of the defining characteristics of the modern world is the dizzying number of choices we have in so many areas. There are 12 million products on Amazon, 50 million songs on Spotify, and 1.7 billion websites. There are undoubtedly large numbers of people with millions of followers on social media websites for one reason or another that MOST OF US have never heard of in our lives.”*
We are confronted today with 1.7 public websites and if you’re a military spy the hidden Internet is much larger! You don’t belong there. Stay out of that poisonous region.
To spend a fortune building a website and then host it is to cause yourself to pay a huge sum to reach very few people. From an economics viewpoint, having a single landing page or a 3-page website attached to and within Singapore Shopper magazine is the better, less expensive, and more effective choice. You don’t have to go find the reading public. I have that public. More and more are subscribing! I’m reaching MORE of them daily through various forms of search engine advertising. Why pay for it when I’m already doing it? They won’t go looking for one when they can have a “catalog” of Restaurant and Cafe ads to consider. That’s why I built this site and why I continue to expand it.
If you’re been watching my site for a while you’ve noted there were stages I’ve been through for design, for making it look right, for making the links work right, for security issues, for a thousand other problems that would be impossible for you to handle yourself because you have all the work you can handle now running a café or restaurant or some other Food and Beverage business.
Yes, you should brand yourself within your city and community and you can do this without competing with 1.7 Billion other websites. You can do it by allowing ONE site to help you at a price so low other advertising firms would first laugh when you tell them the price and say it’s impossible, then weep when they see I’m keeping my promises.
(Keeping my promise of reasonable pricing and transparency is a big important issue to me. I want to be truthful and think everyone should be!)
My friend, let’s do more. Let us tell the world about you, your business, what makes you different, and invite them to come and try. You’ll discover more new faces, more sales, more repeat customers, and more earned Net Income by accepting my advice.
The opening quote is from https://bongino.com/5-reasons-americans-are-becoming-so-hostile-to-each-other-that-a-civil-war-seems-possible?fbclid=IwAR0E7bXf2vqBPoNnxbrLbic_-Tj8G_b-XQ2rdau-VY1nARh1tbFv7PYaoMA
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Customers Explain
How To Have More Success
Lesson 4
Reading time 2-minutes
It’s very important to listen to customer comments and make corrections based upon customer comments. A comment, even a constructive critique is not intended to hurt your self-pride. It’s 90% of the time intended to help you see that something is wrong and needs correction. Rather than display a sour face or even argue, say, “Thank you for telling me that. I’ll do what I can to correct the situation.” And really DO that.
It’s likely you’ll get more customer traffic, more compliments, more smiles, more people saying they’re happy with your service or food, or whatever is your business operation.
“The customer is always right.” What does that mean? It means we will make him/her right. Do your best to be amazing about making the business provide what he/she did not expect and be delighted. In the early years of Macy’s Department Store in New York (the one that ran Thanks Giving Day and Christmas parades for years) had a woman floor manager who helped customers, and constantly worked to amaze customers with bigger sales, new exciting displays, and anything else she could work up.
These days with the Internet, customers can say something unkind and perhaps damage a business. On my website, I delete any such comments or make commentary impossible, but other sites, online travel agency sites allow comments that can ruin a business.
What can we do? Sometimes just paying attention is all that is necessary. I’ve been to a Seattle French Restaurant where the Matrade wanted to speak only French, the menu was in French, he did not want to explain anything and if he did it was so quiet and spoken while looking away I couldn’t hear him. Of course I was displeased. I’ve been in a restaurant in Puerto Rico where I was the ONLY customer. The manager was busy with the cash register and anything, everything else. He was too busy to stop at my table for a moment and ask, “How are you doing? Is there anything more I can bring you or do for you?” In the US often a waitress will stop and just say, “Is everything OK here? Can I warm your coffee for you?” She always gets a bigger tip!
And, I’ve been into restaurants where I was hoping for a quiet romantic conversation with my woman friend and the waiter thought he would get a bigger tip by interrupting us to tell jokes, and I could NOT get him to take my hints and stop pestering me. He got a smaller tip and I never went back there.
I read about a restaurant in The Philippines. A big group of tourists from Korea came in and requested more rice. The waitress said the rice cooker was broken and they couldn’t make more rice! (For 10,000 years people have made rice in a ceramic or metal pot over a fire and these people couldn’t make rice???) My word, order rice from another resto and have it delivered! DO SOMETHING!!!
To make it worse, Filipino custom is to be “ashamed” about nearly anything. To save face the waitresses ignored the customers completely. They wouldn’t even look in their direction. (You can avoid a lot of hurt with an attentive look and a smile.) This is really “adding insult to injury.” That restaurant and beach resort hotel went out of business a year later, and maybe it was because of the bad report displayed on an online travel agency comments page.
But the bottom line is, the management is not managing! Good managers pay attention to everything and know what’s going on all the time. It won’t hurt to take 3-minutes to talk to individuals or the entire group in the early morning, tell them about something wrong (without mentioning names or belittling anyone), and let them know the action you would prefer. A lot of young people come from a home where some adult was always yelling at them. Now they’re afraid to make a move without a given order. These people have been turned into “robots” and they really need your kindly help. Once you see someone is doing what should be done without receiving an order, just thank that person. “Very good, thanks for doing that.” That little compliment mans the world to a young person.
Making a few changes as I have outlined here is easy, it costs nothing, it earns money for the wait staff, and often leads to selling higher profit expensive drinks and deserts.
Be sure the place is clean, the bathrooms are spotless, the windows and signs are clean and in good READABLE condition, pay attention to customer’s needs and wants, and to the other little details, and you’re bound to see an increase in business.
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In The Dining Out Business
Be Responsive To Customer’s Desires
Reading time under 2-minutes
Lesson 5
Technology changes but people do not change. The basic requirements are truth, honesty and good service. If you provide good service your customers will return. If your work is unsatisfactory you must do something to compensate. At least apologize and offer a different food or a free dessert or something.
A happy customer will tell 5 others. An angry customer will tell 20 others. That is the “rule of thumb.” Apparently it has proven true and is often repeated.
Permit me to tell you a story.
Lately, I was shopping for antiviral software for my personal computer and one company “Total AV” made a promise and their sales letter implied that I would get their product for a very low price. I wondered at it, but there was no further information about additional payments.
The next month I was billed I think $8 and I wrote and asked what this was and no one would answer me. I wrote again and asked, “How much money am I paying and how many payments will I be making.” Again there was no reply.
Finally, I cut them off and ordered my bank to stop paying them. Suddenly a man wrote to say, “We want you to come back as a customer.” I wrote to him. There was no reply. Now I have a constant reminder coming to me that they want me to continue with them. It’s never going to happen. In fact, I might tell a few hundred people about this incident through this email!
If your dim sum tastes bad or is too soft or too hard, or the waiter does a bad job, or the bathroom is dirty, someone is going to be upset. If you don’t do something to make that customer happy he’ll be eating someone else’s dim sum next week and telling his friends his story! Don’t let that happen. You know what to do. At least ask, “What can I do to make things right? What do YOU think is fair?” You’ll usually get an honest reasonable response. Even if it’s just, “We sat down at a dirty table” DO SOMETHING! Do something to make that customer happy. At least say, “I’m sorry you had that experience. I will speak to the head waiter about it.”
This applies to every business I know.
I’m honest with my clients. I do my best to OVER-deliver. I want you to get MORE than you paid for, so you’ll tell friends, “He really does keep his promises.” If I keep my promises I’m confident you’ll continue with me for many years. If you are good to your customers I’m confident they will return to you for many years too.
This eating idea is a trend. I don’t expect the world to stop eating any time soon, so I recommend you continue doing a great job, over-deliver, and make customers very, VERY happy.
Speaking of “responsive” all of my website is using the most modern technology and is compatible with all modern small instruments, including Smart Phones. I’m ready for you. The potential new customers are ready for you.
Are YOU ready for more of them?
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Bring Them In With Special Offers
Lesson #6
Reading Time About 4-minutes.
October 20, 2020
Running a restaurant or café in Singapore means we’ve jumped into the fray and we’re in competition with many others. On the other hand, we’ve created a gastronomic market place and the general public is accustomed to dining out more. That’s good for us!
We need to promote more to attract more customers to your restaurant. Once they’re trying your food, and becoming familiar, they’ll keep coming back.
In the next lessons, I’ll present fun, effective, and cost-efficient ways to get more customers into your restaurant, helping you build a loyal following.
Some restaurants have left Flyers around announcing this month’s “Special” but paper can be messy, expensive, get wet and ruined, flops over by its own weight or curls up in the damp air; and it’s expensive. Fortunately, we can put on Singapore Shopper anything you can put on paper. It’s less expensive, won’t get wet and ruined, always looks good, and reaches many more readers island-wide.
All I need is for ONE café or restaurant owner to suggest he wants to run “Specials” and I’ll open a section just for that purpose and links with pointer ads to it on the Cover Page! I can also put the same pointer ad on your landing page.
I hope just passing these terms “pointer ads,” “Cover Page,” and “Landing Page” has you wondering what this means. If you’re new t this I say, You’re missing out on a serious medium designed by a serious advertising writer and producer over many years.
We’re not playing games. I’m bringing more customers to small businesses and you really should join in.
Don’t waste your time and money on a generic ad with every special, event and picture you can fit on it. Potential customers want quick information, and the focus should be on ONE item this month.
Your menu on a web page is helpful, but I don’t push for menus because the more items you have there the less each is emphasized.
Emphasize a Special Food and be specific about pricing it. If you want to do something more for the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday “weekend,” featuring this in the Exciting Dining Weekend Edition will also reach a growing number of subscribers who asked for this information because they want to plan where to go out to eat on the weekend! Don’t ignore those people. They’re your strongest potential market.
Your offer should last a month giving readers time to plan to visit you.
If you’re including a discount reduce the price by at least 20% . Do not write it up as a percentage. Write it as an actual price. For example: “Regular Price; $20, Special Price $16. That’s a 20% Discount This Month Only!
I think it’s better to give away free appetizers or desserts. Something like “Come in with a friend for lunch. Coffee is free for both of you.” Or “Call for reservations for two or more. Get a drink or dessert FREE for your guests.”
This presentation online is a very professional way to reach the dining out public. You’ll reach….
- the right public
- at the right time,
- in the right place to read about it,
- with the right offer,
- and the right message
- in the right format.
I know that’s asking for a lot. It’s my cardinal list. I specialize and focus on providing these factors. Why? Because specific, pointed, well-tested advertising methods get strong response. I don’t want a reputation for wasting your money. (Oh my gosh No!) I want a reputation for bringing you more customers.
The magazine online is the right medium and it’s in the right place.
The reading public wants to dine out so they’re the right public.
They read when they’re planning to do business making them the right public at the right time. They won’t do business when you make an offer. They will do business when they are ready to buy. Therefore we must run the ad for several months and expect within the year, if they like your offer(s), they’ll plan to call and order or come in and dine.
The format is the Internet and the website is made to work on all instruments. It always looks good and it’s always conveniently available. I will place photos correctly. An incorrect placement causes the reader to stop reading!!! That’s terrible. They never finish the message, reach your conclusion, and make a purchase! Even big ad agencies often don’t know this. Their artist makes up what looks good to him/her. The ad won’t work. It kills sales!
We’re not here to decorate. We’re here to bring more customers into your business to make purchases. There’s nothing wrong with that. They want to eat and if they won’t dine with you they’ll go somewhere else. It’s my job to get them to visit you, not just anyone.
The right format should be clean, simple, easy to read and understand, get your offer across quickly and be so irresistible the potential customer says, “OOhhh I want to try that!”
I’m not simply promoting my magazine. I’m promoting your business here. I’m promoting getting more customer traffic to you and more profit into your accounting figures. The placement of these ads can be inexpensive.
The Exciting Dining Weekend Edition is presently planned for $50/weekend. (I’ll begin at a lower price while we’re building readership.) I’ll place the pointer ad for the “Special” offer on your Landing page FREE of Charge. I’ll Create a “Weekly Specials” Section and add your offer to it in a similar appearance and fashion to the Weekend Edition for just $45 for the entire week! A link from that offer will go to your Landing Page so we can get a count of visitors. It’s important that you know your ad is not just a gong sounding in an empty desert. You want to see the counter indicating more visitors to your Landing Page and then we assume, they are calling you or visiting any other website you own. If you don’t have any website for an honest price I can build a one or three-page “sub-site” for you hosted in the magazine. This is at a lower cost and much less trouble and work than trying to do this yourself.
(No One in the publishing and advertising world will do all of this so inexpensively!) For this year 2021, while we’re getting started in Singapore, that’s a low price and a very handsome offer that’s bound to bring you a profit. Actually no one else in Singapore is running a Dining Out Guide like this and thus it’s the best medium in town for this purpose.
Add it all up: A month-long package can be had for as many Weekend Editions as you want + $45 to go into the Weekly Specials Section. If your offer is exciting you’ll see so much profit I think you’ll be sending me a request to enter you in the Weekend Edition the full four or five weekends for the month! Why Not? You want that profit don’t you?
At most, the entire package for 4 weeks could cost S$245. At the lowest just run the $45 Weekly Special as a test and see what happens to your page counter numbers.
A good photo of the items offered is really essential. I prefer professional photos but if all you have is a cell phone with a pretty good camera in it, send me that photo and I’ll make the most of it. Photos on a white plate work very well.
By the way, if you have a young person living at home desperate for good honest work, there’s a lot of information on YouTube and in books teaching about food photography. Get that person a good camera, and with some training and testing, he/she can go out on jobs and make a sterling extra income.
I will promote these photographers on a “Recommended Photographers” page for just $5/month. You can’t beat that offer! It should not be free, but it should not be too expensive either. I want to help our young friends get started in a decent, honest sideline or career and if it’s a favor to their family, I’m thankful to help!
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Your Daily Reading — An archive of letters to help YOU have More and MORE Customer Traffic. This developing archive could sell for at least $200/year but it’s yours free. Obviously, it doesn’t help you if you don’t make a few minutes to read some at least 2 or 3 times per week. Good Look! >>>
