The holiday season brings plenty of opportunities for restaurants to connect with guests and drive revenue. A thoughtful marketing strategy can help you make the most of the season, from promoting seasonal menus and experiences to increasing gift card sales and keeping guests engaged after the holiday rush.
With Klaviyo, you can simplify your holiday marketing through smarter audience segmentation, personalized messaging, automation, and AI-powered tools. Whether you're looking to fill tables during peak periods or encourage repeat visits when traffic slows, this guide will help you turn seasonal opportunities into lasting guest relationships.
Understand your path
Each restaurant type has customers who respond differently to messaging. While restaurants follow a general playbook, your strategy should reflect your restaurant type and how your guests engage. Start with the general playbook by driving traffic and building repeat loyalty. Once you identify your restaurant type, tailor your approach to the focus areas that matter most.
Click into each dropdown to review each restaurant type.
QSR or Fast Casual
Who you are: Counter-service restaurants focused on speed and convenience. Fast casual can be slightly more premium, or made-to-order.
Your focus: Convenience, mobile ordering, delivery, loyalty rewards/engagement, limited-edition items, seasonal menus, catering/group ordering/bundles, and gift cards.
Casual dining
Who you are: Full-service restaurants with a broader menu and a more relaxed experience.
Your focus: loyalty rewards/engagement, mobile ordering, delivery, reservations, catering/group ordering/bundles, private events, group bookings (private parties, small corporate gatherings), seasonal menus, and gift cards.
Elevated dining or Fine dining
Who you are: Full-service restaurants with a formal and higher-end experience, often for special occasions.
Your focus: Reservations, prix fixe or tasting menus, catering/group ordering/bundles, special events (seasonal), VIP recognition, and gift cards.
Complete your foundation
Once you identify your path, you can lay your foundation. Your foundation is what comes before you build your full calendar, and serves as a basis for everything going forward.
Need to save time? Klaviyo’s AI tool Composer can tap into your account to assist you in creating campaigns, generate subject line ideas for seasonal promotions, audit your content, and more.
Review each tab below to ensure you are prepared for this time period:
Unify your data
Connect your marketing tech stack to Klaviyo to access the guest data and behavioral signals needed to power more relevant holiday messaging.
- Reservation platforms: Integrate your reservation platform to trigger canceled-reservation recovery flows and bring high-intent guests back during the busy holiday season, which is especially valuable for fine dining.
- Social Marketing: Use Klaviyo Social Marketing to connect creator profiles across your socials and create actionable User-Generated Content (UGC). Create social auto-replies to collect important customer information. You can do this by asking your Instagram follows to reply with a keyword, like HOLIDAY, to receive seasonal menu items. Then, you can collect important information for your list, like emails and phone numbers. Once all this information is collected, gain social proof throughout the holiday season by using your customers’ User-Generated Content (UGC). (Note: Consent is required to use your customers’ UGC.)
Protect your deliverability
Starting in October, you will likely begin to ramp up email send volume through the end of the year. It's important to maintain a good deliverability score to ensure your emails reach your customers' inboxes.
- Clean your list: Avoid harming your deliverability before hitting your high-volume window later in your calendar by cleaning your list. Identify unengaged contacts, exclude them from regular sends, then suppress those who never engaged.
- Deliverability Hub: Head over to the Deliverability Hub to review your sender reputation for both emails and mobile messaging. Check the sender-reputation score and bounce details. Then, start with recently engaged subscribers and increase volume steadily.
- Follow the 80/20 rule: Transactional emails should be at least 80% essential content and no more than 20% non-essential or lightly branded content. There should be no business content present for UK/EU recipients. Learn more about transactional emails and how they can impact deliverability in the Help Center.
Confirm your core automations
Your always-on flows will remain important during the holiday season and can be an easy, automatic way to maintain customers throughout the year. This is the time to confirm they are all in place to complete your foundation.
- Always-on automations: Confirm you’ve set up your core flows, including: welcome, created reservation, completed reservation, post-order, winback, sunset, and gift cards.
- Add seasonal automations: Build upon your core flows with seasonal gift card and reservation flows.
- Build a gift card flow based on last year’s gift card purchasers. Promote a holiday bonus gift card, then send a reminder before the offer ends in January or February. Target guests who purchased gift cards last year but haven’t purchased this year, prior to the gift card offer expiration in January-February.
- Build a reservation reminder flow that serves as a reminder for an upcoming reservation, with added content, such as new seasonal menu items.
Refresh and test your always-on forms
Before the holiday rush, review your forms and the journey they support. Test the full experience on mobile. Confirm that links work, the welcome series fires upon submission, and that your website and forms are holiday-ready. Focus on these 2 forms:
- Create two-step forms that offer a discount in exchange or email and text message opt-in.
- Add an always-on form to your website that provides a place for a stream of subscribers to add to your list year-round.
You can always A/B test your forms to see what works and what doesn’t. Then, then use the results to make small adjustments and improve performance over time. Learn more about A/B testing your sign-up forms here.
Build your messaging calendar
Aim to have your holiday planning underway by September, with a calendar that carries through the end of January. Joining later in the season? Start with the opportunities still ahead, and use this framework to get an earlier start for next year.
September-October |
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Early-Mid November |
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Early-Mid December |
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End of December-January |
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