Restaurant email marketing Zayos, the five sends that earn a reorder
Published July 2026 · Updated July 26, 2026
Restaurant email marketing is using the addresses you collected at checkout to bring diners back. The money is in five automations that run on a trigger, not in a monthly newsletter. It costs close to nothing per send, so the real constraints are deliverability and having something to say.
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Why is email still the best marketing a restaurant owns?
Two reasons, and neither is about email being fashionable. The first is cost. Sending to a thousand people costs a fraction of a cent each, which means a send that produces a single order has usually paid for itself several times over. There is no other channel where the arithmetic is that forgiving.
The second is ownership. A social following belongs to the platform and gets shown to whoever the platform decides. An email list belongs to you and goes where you send it. When a marketplace changes its commission tier or an algorithm changes what your posts reach, the list is the one asset in the business that does not move.
What genuinely stopped working is the monthly newsletter. Not because people hate restaurants, but because a message written on your schedule lands on a day that means nothing to the reader. The shift that makes restaurant email work is from calendar sends to triggered sends, where the reader’s own behavior decides the timing.
Which five emails should a restaurant set up first?
Build these once and they keep running while you are on the line. Ordered by what they return, not by how they look in a demo. If you only ever build one, build the first.
The second order nudge
TriggerThree to five days after a diner’s first ever order
What it saysThank them by name, say what they ordered, and give a one tap reorder link. A small incentive is optional and usually unnecessary.
Why it earnsThe gap between one order and two is the widest gap in the whole customer lifecycle. Nothing else you automate touches a group this ready to come back.
The lapsed regular
TriggerSixty days with no order, from someone with three or more lifetime orders
What it saysShort and human. You have not seen them in a while, here is what is new, here is the link. No graphics, no promotion stack.
Why it earnsThey already came back twice, so something interrupted a habit. This is the cheapest sale in the building and the one restaurants almost never go after.
The receipt
TriggerEvery completed order, immediately
What it saysThe order detail they are expecting, and exactly one line at the bottom about something else: catering, the loyalty balance, the new hours.
Why it earnsIt is the most opened email your restaurant will ever send, because the diner is waiting for it. Put one thing at the bottom. Five things there turns a receipt into an ad and costs you the open next time.
The review ask
TriggerA couple of hours after a completed pickup or delivery, once per diner per quarter
What it saysOne question, one link to the profile you want reviewed. Do not gate it on the answer being positive.
Why it earnsReviews are the closest thing a local restaurant has to compounding interest, and the moment right after a good meal is the only moment anyone will write one.
The catering follow up
TriggerThirty days after a catering order
What it saysReference the event, offer the same order again for a date the buyer picks, and include the paperwork fields their accounting team needed last time.
Why it earnsOffice buyers repeat on a calendar rather than a craving. One well-timed email to a corporate buyer is worth more than a month of consumer sends.
One rule sits above all five: one message per event, ever. A diner who gets the same review request three times because three systems each thought it was their job will unsubscribe, and they will be right to. Deduplication is not a nice touch in restaurant email, it is the difference between a list that grows and a list that leaks.
Why do restaurant emails end up in spam?
Because a mailbox provider decides, not you, and it decides on evidence. Six rules cover almost every case, and the first one alone explains most of the restaurant email that quietly never arrives.
Authenticate the domain, all three records
SPF, DKIM and DMARC published in your DNS. Gmail and Yahoo tightened their bulk sender requirements in 2024, and unauthenticated mail from a sender of any volume now gets throttled or rejected outright. This is a one-time setup your email provider will walk you through, and skipping it is the single most common reason restaurant email disappears.
Send from your own domain
hello@yourrestaurant.com, not yourrestaurant@gmail.com. A free-provider from-address fails alignment checks and reads as a stranger. If you have a domain for your ordering site, you already have this.
One click unsubscribe, honored immediately
A visible link and the list-unsubscribe header, processed within two days. Both Gmail and Yahoo now require this from bulk senders. Making it hard to leave does not keep subscribers, it converts them into spam complaints, which cost far more.
Keep spam complaints under 0.3%
That is the published threshold Gmail asks bulk senders to stay below, and it is measured against messages delivered, not sent. Three complaints in a thousand is the line. Frequency and irrelevance are what push you over it.
Sunset the addresses that never open
Someone who has not engaged in a year is a deliverability liability, not an audience. Mailbox providers watch engagement to decide where you land. Remove hard bounces immediately and retire the long-dead addresses, even though a smaller list feels like a loss.
Never buy a list
Purchased addresses have no relationship with you, they generate complaints and spam trap hits, and they can poison the reputation of a domain you have spent years building. There is no clever way around this.
What should you measure, now that open rate is broken?
Open rate used to be the number everyone quoted. Apple Mail Privacy Protection changed that: for many recipients the tracking image is fetched automatically whether or not a person ever looked, so an open is recorded either way. Your open rate is inflated by an amount you cannot see, which varies with how many of your diners use Apple Mail. It is still fine for comparing two sends to the same list. It is not evidence that anyone read anything.
Measure revenue per recipient instead. Attributable orders in the 48 hours after a send, times average ticket, divided by the number of people mailed. One number, comparable across lists of any size, and it answers the only question that matters: did this send produce food going out the door.
Two supporting numbers are worth a monthly glance. Unsubscribe rate per send tells you whether your frequency is wrong. Spam complaint rate tells you whether your relevance is wrong, and it needs to stay under the 0.3% Gmail asks bulk senders to hold, measured against delivered mail. Everything else on a marketing dashboard is decoration.
How does email work on Zayos?
Zayos is commission-free direct ordering for independent restaurants, and email is part of the plan rather than a separate bill. The important part happens before any campaign exists: every direct order on your branded site captures a name, an email, a phone number and the diner’s consent, with a timestamp, and writes it to a customer book you can export whenever you want. A marketing tool with no source of addresses is a very expensive text editor.
Reorder messaging over email, SMS and web push is included in every tier, with no per-contact pricing, which matters because per-contact pricing charges you more as the asset gets more valuable. Sends are built from order history, so a lapsed segment or a group who ordered a specific dish is a filter rather than a project. Order emails are sent one touch per event, deduplicated, so the same diner never receives the same request twice from two parts of the system.
The limit is the same one every platform has. Orders ingested from DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub through our Otter integration land on the same kitchen tablet, which is good for your line, but they carry no usable email address. Every address on your list will come from a channel you own, which is the practical case for direct ordering stated as a marketing problem.
Pricing is flat and public: Operator $499 a month, Operator plus Marketplace $599, Concierge $699, each per location, month to month, no setup fee. The only per-order cost is the service fee the diner pays at checkout, $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine-in, 10% catering. The restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue and 100% of tips. Full detail on pricing and fares.
We are a Fort Lauderdale company and our operators are in South Florida. Naya Grill in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach runs direct ordering on Zayos today and keeps $48k+ a year that used to go to commissions. Storefronts are built for Shishka Lebanese Grill, La Vie Mediterranean, Yummy Grill, aura, Courtyard Cafe, Mr. Smoke across 13 locations, Yalla Market and Tap That Ash, each opening ordering at launch. Most operators are live in under two weeks. See how it works or what is Zayos.
Email, answered straight.
Does email marketing still work for restaurants?
How often should a restaurant email its customers?
Why do my restaurant emails go to spam?
Is open rate still a useful metric?
What should I actually measure?
Where do I get email addresses in the first place?
No list, no email. It starts at checkout.
The free AI report reads your public ordering channels and shows how many of your orders leave you an address you can write to. About 60 seconds, no card, no call.
Terms explained plainly in the operator glossary.