I have worked with some restaurants to increase their restaurant marketing on the Internet in the past.
This can be extremely successful. However, it does take some preparation and some analysys.
First, you do not want to look at the value of a customer as a one time visitor. If you believe in your restaurant, you will want to look at the lifetime value of your restaurant customer.
For example, I worked with a nice steak house that thought a realistic value for a new customer was $50 per visit. They thought that person (couple, family) would come back an average of once a month for 5 years. So the value of one customer for them is $50 x 12 x 5 = $3,000
Now this is important, because we helped them set up a restaurant marketing lead generation engine that produced roughly 80 new visitors per month that would download their coupon and join their email list. Now, 80 x 50 = $4,000 – not bad. But if you look at lifetime value of the restaurant patron, it becomes 80 x $3,000 = $240,000. Now you are adding a quarter of a million dollars in revenue to the restaurant every month in new customer value.
It is well worth doing Internet Marketing for restaurants. Restaurant marketing when done well, and when you understand the real value of the new customer, if very high and will make your restaurant much more successful.