Make a Reservation With Us Online

A few weeks ago, we thought we'd test drive a cool functionality that OpenTable offers restaurants. If you visit our official website (http://orlandoichiban.com), you will see that we are now offering the opportunity to make a reservation with us by simply clicking a few links.

First, all you have to do is find the option located at the top right of our website. We wanted to make it stand out for the time being, so you will see a cheesy "New" icon to the left of the link.

 

When you click on the link, you will then be taken to a simple OpenTable reservation page. All you have to do is pick the date, time, and the number of people that will be dining with us and submit the information by clicking on the "Find a Table" button.

As soon as you submit the information, you will be given a confirmation and we will be informed of your reservation.

We feel that this is a very simple way for us to extend our level of customer service to our lovable online community.

We believe that if we make it easier to secure a table to dine with us in advance, it might just make you all come in more often.

Prove us right! :)

Facebook Advertising: Our Results Thus Far

So it has been a few weeks since we decided to test our luck with a little paid advertising on Facebook. We figured we would spend conservatively, track all activity, and just see what happens.

Going into the process, we understood that as a restaurant, it's extremely tough to track every single call-to-action. This means that there is no way for us to tell if an ad sparked an interest in the person that clicked on the ad if they don't decide to call to make a reservation or fill out our contact form. Most people will just see the ad, view our website, and set a mental note to come dine with us at some point in the near future.

Since we don't burden our diners with surveys and questions that ask them how they heard about us, it's evident that tracking conversions is a little broken in this process. However, with site analytics and the copy within the ad, we can get our message across and vaguely understand how successful our efforts are.

So, two weeks into it, here's where we stand:

Spend: $47.00
Site Visitors: 110
Tracked Actions: 5
Estimated Diners: 12

Overall, it seems that these numbers show us that our efforts have been a success thus far.

This was our strategy with each ad:

- We ran 3 ads total.
- One was targeted to people in Orlando on their birthday telling them to celebrate with us.
- One was targeted to people in Orlando that listed "sushi" as an interest on their profile.
- One was targeted to everybody in Orlando in general.

After analyzing it, surprisingly, over 50% of our conversions were people celebrating their birthday. I guess that means that our restaurant makes for a fun birthday atmosphere (Sake Bombs, anyone?).

In conclusion, we feel that we will continue to advertise on Facebook as long as we continue to see similar results as these. At the very least, targeting on birthdays should always be employed as it has yielded us the most obvious results. 

Anime Bento

We love finding amazing innovations in Japanese cuisine. Thanks to our friend @syph on Twitter, we stumbled on a great collection of creative bento boxes that were designed around anime characters. Not only do the creations look beautiful, but they also look delicious.

Here are some of our favorites that we found:

There are plenty more that you can view over at the original post found here.

Again, thanks to @syph for the amazing discovery.

Labor Day Weekend Special

To celebrate Labor Day this weekend, we are proud to announce a special opportunity to get 15% off your dinner meals if you decide to eat with us on Friday and/or Saturday night.

We will be facilitating this special by using a secret code word. This code word will enable us to track who is coming in for the holiday special and who is just randomly dining with us and not even paying attention to all of our special Internet promotions (they're missing out).

Without further adieu, the secret code word(s) is: LABOR DAY.

Tough one, isn't it? Hopefully, you'll be able to remember it.

All you have to do is come in on either Friday, September 3rd for dinner from 7pm to close, or on Saturday, September 4th from 7pm to close, say the word, and we will take 15% off your entire check.

We're honored to be able to give all of you hard workers an inexpensive and relaxing night of our delicious Japanese food. It really is the least we can do.

Tell your friends and we hope to see all of you for dinner to celebrate the long holiday weekend.