Restaurant Marketing Calendar Playbook

Plan 90 days at a time

Ninety days covers a season and is short enough that you'll finish the plan.

Start with a blank three month calendar. Mark your slow weeks, holidays, local events, and planned menu changes. The slow weeks get a campaign first, because busy weeks mostly fill themselves.

Write the next quarter's plan in the last two weeks of the current one. That leaves time to order ingredients, shoot photos, and brief staff before the first send.

Keep the calendar where the whole team can see it. A shared sheet works. So does a printout by the pass, since the kitchen should hear about a promotion before the tickets arrive.

Find your slow weeks in last year's orders

Memory tends to pick the week that felt worst, not the one that sold least. Pull last year's direct orders by week from your POS or ordering reports instead.

Sort the 52 weeks from lowest to highest. The bottom 13 are your slow weeks, and each one gets a campaign on the calendar before any busy week does.

Say a location averaged 300 direct orders a week last year. Its two weeks after New Year's came in at 210 each. That's 90 orders a week below average.

Set a goal smaller than the gap. Winning back 30 of those 90 orders gives you a number to check the campaign against.

Note the weather beside each slow week too. Heat, snow, and heavy rain can push pickup and delivery in opposite directions, and last year's orders show which way yours went.

Mark the US dates restaurants plan around

Holidays come in two kinds. Some bring guests out, like Mother's Day and Valentine's Day. Others keep them home and hungry, like Super Bowl Sunday, when pickup and catering matter more than tables.

The table below lists the national dates by quarter.

Add the local dates no national list has. Home games, the county fair, school breaks, a street festival, and road work outside your door can move orders more than any national food day.

Pick three or four dates a quarter, not all of them. A campaign on every holiday teaches guests to skim past you, and your unsubscribes will show it.

Give every date a lead time

Each date needs a day the work starts, as well as a send day. Count back from the day guests order.

Preorders get two sends. For Mother's Day brunch, Thanksgiving pies, or holiday party trays, announce three weeks out and remind guests five days before the cutoff.

Gift cards sell all through December. Send the first note the week after Thanksgiving and the last a few days before Christmas, while a digital card still arrives in time.

Holiday hours need the longest lead. Change them two weeks ahead in your POS or the Appetier console, because Yelp can hold a listing change for up to two weeks.

Photos and menu items come before copy. If a seasonal dish isn't on the menu and photographed by its lead date, move the send.

Tie each promotion to real news

A new dish, a seasonal menu, or a supplier you're proud of gives you something true to say. A discount with no news behind it teaches guests to wait for the next one.

News can be small. A dish back for the season, a new pickup window, the patio opening, or a local farm's first corn all count.

Save discounts for the slow weeks you found. A full-price week doesn't need one, and a discount there gives away margin for orders you'd have had anyway.

Fill in one row per campaign

Keep the plan as a simple table with one row per campaign.

The table below lists each column, what goes in it, and the National Pizza Day example from the next section.

Regulars and quiet guests get different messages, so pick one audience per row. Give each row one owner. A campaign with two owners is the one that goes out late, or twice.

Fill in the result the following week.

A filled-in row, with the math

Here's one row for National Pizza Day, written out in full so you can copy the pattern.

Week and goal: the week of February 9. Tuesday to Thursday normally brings 45 direct orders, so the goal is 60.

Audience: guests who ordered a pizza in the last 90 days. Weekly regulars are left out, since they'd order anyway.

Message: the new white pie is on the menu, and it's the one the staff eat after close.

Offer: free garlic knots with any pizza. The knots cost $1.40 in food and packaging, so 60 orders would cost $84.

Channel and send day: email the afternoon before, and a Google Business post the same day. Lead date: the white pie photo three days before the send.

Result: 61 orders, which is 16 more than the usual 45. At a $28 average ticket, those 16 orders brought $448 in sales.

Price the offer against every order that used it, including guests who'd have ordered anyway. Knots for all 61 orders cost $85.40, well under the $448 the extra orders brought in.

Space sends so guests keep reading

Send any one guest one marketing message a week at most. Put the recurring birthday and winback notes on the same calendar, so nobody gets three messages in four days.

Send before guests decide, not during the meal. Mid-afternoon suits a dinner offer. The evening before suits weekend brunch.

Texts carry stricter rules than email. Federal rules bar marketing texts before 8 a.m. and after 9 p.m. in the guest's time zone, and some states set tighter hours.

Text only guests who opted in to texts. An email opt-in doesn't cover a phone number.

Count orders, not opens

An open rate tells you about a subject line. Count the direct orders that came in during the few days after each send.

Compare against the same weekdays over the four weeks before. A Tuesday campaign measured against a Saturday proves nothing.

Change one thing per campaign. If the offer, the audience, and the send day all change at once, you won't know which one worked.

Write the result into the row within a week, while you still remember what else happened. A rainy weekend or a closed road belongs in the notes beside the number.

Fix a campaign that goes wrong before it goes out

A sent message can't be recalled. Open the offer code, the dates, and the link on a phone before anything goes out.

When the promoted dish sells out, mark it sold out right away. On Appetier, sold-out items reach your ordering site without publishing, so guests stop ordering something you can't make.

When the photo or the dish isn't ready, push the send back a week. A late campaign costs less than promoting something guests can't order.

Unsubscribes jumping after a send usually point to frequency before the message. Drop that audience to every other week for the rest of the quarter.

A campaign that misses its goal twice gets one change. After a third miss, retire it and give the week to a different idea.

Leave the recurring campaigns off the calendar

Some campaigns follow the guest, not the date. A first-order follow-up, a birthday note, and an invitation back for a regular who drifts all belong here.

Sous is Appetier's AI agent, and it sends those as each guest's timing comes up. It never offers a bigger discount than you allow, and quiet hours hold.

Sous can also post up to three times a week from your own photos and menu. You approve each post until you decide to let it run.

Keep your calendar for what only you can decide: the seasonal menu, the holiday preorder, and the local event.