Email marketing for a small restaurant

[BistroGirl]

Hi. I'm not sure if this is the best place for me to post this, but I figured that someone in here probably has experience with email marketing...
My husband and I are thinking about doing some email marketing along side direct mail for our restaurant for a while to see how it works. We are in the process of having a website designed and we thought it would be a good time to start if we were going to try email marketing. We have been open for a year and a half, so we have a pretty good number of regulars that we could collect email addresses from. We were thinking of sending coupons and announcements for live music (which we usually have 2 weekends a month). I found one company that sounds like it should be able to facilitate what we want to do, http://www.murgent.com. Has anyone heard of them before? I want to get some opinions about email marketing from some seasoned pros before we jump into this. Any thoughts would be great! Thanks so much

Anne

[Hope]

I have never heard of this company. eMail marketing is not very difficult, it is just a matter or knowing your message and how to get it across. If you have a group of regulars already, then you have it easy. There are many "self-server" services like Constant Contact that are inexpensive. They manage your opt outs also.

[Andy]

If you can get a mailing-list feature with your hosting, I suggest you do it yourself so you can email announcements and have total control over the message content.

I recently installed a free script for this purpose which includes subscribe/un-subscribe functionality. Maybe you could get your web designers to implement it? : http://tincan.co.uk/?lid=294 I suspect this is the best web-hosted mail list software available and its free.

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