Do you have a Lasagna List?

Mar 30 2009

I couldn’t sleep last week and ended up watching a late-night repeat one of my favorite shows: Diners Drive-In + Dives on the Food Network. Yes, I am hopelessly addicted to nearly all programming around the preparation of, history of and consumption of food. Except those seemlingly daily cake-baking contests but I digress.

Back to my original point… One of the restaurants being featured on Triple D that night was renowned for their lasagna — a dish that is not on the regular menu, only made periodically as a special. So they started a “lasagna list”, a log of devoted patrons that wanted a phone call every time the restaurant made lasagna.

Consider the marketing value of such a thing and consider the quality of relationship you need to have with a customer — especially in a relatively anonymous business like food service — in order to not only acquire a personal phone number for marketing purposes but to also expect that your customers will alter their behavior based on hearing from you.

And although it never hurts to have a killer pasta dish on your side just about any business can take a lesson from the lasanga list, no time in the kitchen required. If you take the time to think about it, there’s probably something going on in your business that your customers would enjoy hearing about every once in a while.

Note also that in the age of social media, there are lots of ways you can engage with your customers without hopping on the phone or doing the typical email newsletter. Your lasanga list could easily be maintained through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or YouTube. These are all great ways to remind people you do business with about what makes your business special and why they probably started working with you in the first place.