About This Site
This site exists because restaurant email marketing has almost no good, neutral information about it. What exists is either a software vendor writing a "best X" list with themselves at the top, or a generic marketing blog that has never worked a Friday service. Everything here is written for one reader: the person who owns the restaurant, or runs the marketing for it, and does not have a marketing department.
Who runs this
This site is run by the emailforrestaurants.com team.
Before this, the people behind it spent years on the restaurant side of the business — and watched every owner solve email marketing the same way: alone, after service, with a spreadsheet and a sense that they were doing it wrong.
We built emailforrestaurants.com because the information gap is not a knowledge gap, it is an honesty gap. The software is not the hard part. Knowing which tool does what, and what it will actually cost you, and where it will hurt you — that is the hard part, and almost nobody publishes it.
How the software list is chosen and ranked
There are eight tools on the software comparison page. They were not picked because they paid to be there — no vendor has ever paid for placement here, and none is allowed to. The list is built on four criteria, in this order:
1. Where your guest list comes from. This is the first question, and it decides more than any feature list. A tool that starts at the point of sale or the reservation book builds a list for you. A tool that only sends emails assumes you already have one — and most single-location restaurants do not, yet.
2. The all-in monthly cost for one location. Not the headline price. The cost of actually having working email marketing at a restaurant with a few hundred guests, including what the vendor will not tell you in the comparison chart. Where a vendor does not publish a price, the page says so instead of guessing.
3. What it does not do well. Every tool on that page has a “what’s wrong with it” section. A tool with no weaknesses listed is not a recommendation, it is an advert.
4. How hard it is to leave. If changing tools costs you your guest list, your website, or a year of commitment, the reader deserves to know that before they sign, not after.
The ranking is a judgement, not a formula. When two tools are genuinely close, the order reflects who they are best for, and the page says who that is.
How we make money
This site runs advertising. That’s it — no affiliate deals, no sponsorship, no vendor has ever paid to be on this site or to move up a ranking.
Two consequences worth stating plainly:
- No vendor pays for a better rank. The order of the tools is set by the four criteria above and is the same every time we publish it.
- Advertising never goes inside the comparison. No ads on the comparison table, and no ads on the software comparison page at all. A page that ranks tools should not also be selling ads next to them. Ads appear on the template pages, below the content.
The reason this site is worth reading is that it tells you what is wrong with each option. An ad next to a paid ranking would take that away, so it isn’t something we do.
How we verify what we publish
This is the part that actually matters, so we spell it out.
Every price was read from the vendor’s own pricing page, on a date we publish, and we re-check on the first of each month. Where a vendor does not publish a price, the page says so. Two of the eight tools on the comparison page work that way. It would have been easy to make those two cells up, and it would have been the least honest thing on the internet.
When a vendor’s marketing page and its terms disagree, we use the terms. One of these tools advertises “no contracts, cancel anytime” on its pricing page while its client terms provide for a minimum commitment period and automatic one-year renewal. Both are true. Only one binds you, so that is the one we tell you about.
We publish the corrections we find. Several facts on the comparison page were wrong on the pages we started from — including one where a widely repeated claim turned out to be false. We changed them, and we did not quietly leave the old version up.
Every tool has a section on what it does badly. Not “what to watch out for” — what it actually does badly. A tool with no weaknesses listed is not a recommendation, it is an advert.
We don’t publish numbers we can’t source. If we quote an open rate or a revenue figure, it comes from a named, linkable source, and where it is a vendor’s own claim about its own customers, we say so.
What we don’t do here
- We don’t run your email for you. Every template is yours to copy and change. We are not a marketing agency and we do not want to be one.
- We don’t rank by payment. There is no payment to rank by. That is simpler than most of the lists you will read.
- We don’t publish benchmarks we can’t source. If we quote an open rate or a revenue figure, it comes from a named, linkable source. Where a number is a vendor’s own claim about its customers, we say so.
- We don’t pretend a tool is free when it isn’t. Several of these products have a free tier that excludes email marketing entirely, and the comparison page says which ones and which don’t.
- We don’t hide the pricing model. Four of these tools charge per location, per cover, or by contract. Four charge per contact. Putting those side by side without saying so would be a trick, so the table labels the basis.
Editorial policy
| Who writes the pages | The emailforrestaurants.com team. Every template and every sentence on this site is written and edited by a person, not generated and published unedited. |
| How often it’s reviewed | The software comparison page is checked against each vendor’s pricing monthly. Templates are reviewed quarterly, and seasonal content is rewritten every January. |
| How corrections are handled | If a vendor changes a price and we have not noticed yet, the page is wrong and that is on us. Send it to us and corrections get made. |
| How vendors are removed | A tool comes off the list if it stops working for the reader, if it stops existing, or if its pricing changes so much that it no longer belongs in the comparison. It does not come off the list for complaining about us. |
| Independence | No vendor has paid for placement, a review, or a better rank. No vendor has seen a page before it was published. The site is funded by advertising, and advertising is not sold to the vendors on this list — an advertiser buys an impression, never a rank, a paragraph, or a mention. |
| What we do not do | We do not accept guest posts, sponsored reviews, paid placements, or “brand partnerships” of any kind. If a vendor asks, the answer is no. |
A note on the templates
The email templates on this site are written to be sent, not to be admired. Each one is a complete email with a subject line, the timing that decides whether it works, and the offer that brings people through the door. They are free to copy and use as they are.
The one thing we cannot write for you is the offer that fits your restaurant. Everything else is here.
Get in touch
Found a mistake, or run a restaurant and want to tell us what email marketing actually looks like from your side? We read everything.
Corrections to the software comparison page are the most useful thing you can send us. If a price has changed, we want to know.
Written by the emailforrestaurants.com team. Every price on the comparison page was read from the vendor's own site and re-checked on the first of each month.