Welcome email for restaurants that fills your dining room

Trigger. Send the moment someone joins your list. For restaurants, the best signups come from your reservation confirmation page, your online ordering checkout, the wifi captive portal, and a tablet at the host stand. Each one captures a guest who just had a real moment with your room. Wait 48 hours and that warmth is gone.

Timing. Inside 5 minutes. Hospitality intent is fresh and local. A guest who finished dinner tonight and joined your list will open a welcome email tonight. Send it tomorrow afternoon and you compete with everything else in the inbox.

Offer. Make it specific and menu-anchored. "Free antipasto on your next visit" beats "10 percent off." Free items cost less than a discount and read as hospitality, not a coupon. Olea Trattoria comps a bruschetta board. A pizzeria gives a free garlic knot order. A cocktail bar waives the first round's service charge. Pick one dish, name it, show it.

Copy angle. Write like the owner. Use the chef's first name. Name your neighborhood and your block. Mention the dish you are known for. New guests want to know who is cooking and where they are going. "Ciao, I'm Marco. We opened Olea on Halsted Street in 2019 because I could not find the bread my grandmother made" outperforms generic marketing copy every time.

CTA. One button. Reserve a table. That is the highest-value action for a sit-down restaurant, so point it at your reservation system (Resy, OpenTable, Tock). If you run counter-service or takeout only, swap the copy to Order online and link your ordering provider.

Numbers to expect. Restaurant welcome emails open at 45 to 60 percent. Welcome offers built around a free, named item redeem at 8 to 14 percent. Generic percent-off offers redeem at 3 to 5 percent. The free-item lift more than covers food cost.

Nested tables, not divs. Email HTML is not web HTML. Layout lives inside nested table, tr, and td elements. Flexbox and CSS grid do not exist in Outlook. This template stacks three table levels for every column block, so Gmail, Apple Mail, Yahoo, and Outlook all render the same layout.

Inline CSS. Every style sits in a style attribute on its own element. Gmail strips your style block when it grows past a threshold, and Outlook ignores most of it anyway. Inline styles survive both.

Bulletproof VML button for Outlook. Outlook 2016 through 2021 run on the Word rendering engine, which ignores CSS borders and padding on links. The button in this template carries a VML rectangle fallback inside a conditional comment, so it appears as a real rounded button in Outlook, not a bare text link.

Live text. Headline, offer, and body are selectable text, not images. Live text scales on mobile, loads instantly, and passes accessibility checks. We carry one food photo and no image-based headlines.

Dark-mode color-scheme meta. The head carries the color-scheme and supported-color-schemes meta tags. Apple Mail and Outlook dark mode read them and invert the background cleanly, instead of leaving a bright white box behind your copy.

One mobile media query. A single max-width 480px block handles font scaling and button full-width. One media query covers roughly 95 percent of mobile clients.

Web-font fallbacks. Headlines fall back to Georgia, then the system serif. We never load a remote web font as the only option, because Gmail strips linked fonts and import rules. Your voice stays consistent even when the font does not load.

Copy the HTML. Mailwright exports a single HTML file. Download it.

Paste into Klaviyo. Open your Welcome series flow. Drag in an Email action, open the email, switch the designer to the HTML source view, and paste the full HTML. Klaviyo parses the tables and inline styles as-is.

Paste into Mailchimp. Start a new campaign, choose Code your own, then Paste in code. Drop the HTML into the editor and save.

Swap your brand. Replace the logo image URL, swap the brand red (currently #7a1f1f) for your restaurant's hex, and swap the hero photo. Change Marco's name, the block, and the signature to your owner. Update the address and hours in the footer.

Wire merge tags. In Klaviyo, greet the guest with {{ first_name|default:'friend' }}. Pull in loyalty points with {{ person|lookup:'loyalty_points' }}. Point the button at your Resy or OpenTable URL. In Mailchimp, use *|FNAME|* for the first name and *|REWARD_POINTS|* for points.

Test before you send. Send a proof to yourself in Gmail (web and mobile), Apple Mail on an iPhone, and Outlook on Windows. Toggle dark mode on the iPhone. Confirm the button reads as a real button in Outlook and the food photo loads over cellular. Fix and resend.