You are paying for Toast email marketing every single month.
Most restaurants on Toast are. The tool is bundled into their plan or added as a $75/month feature, and it sits completely untouched while the owner keeps boosting Instagram posts and hoping for the best.
This guide walks you through the full Toast email marketing setup process, step by step. By the end, you will know exactly what to configure, how to build your first campaign, and how to use ToastIQ, Toast's AI marketing tool, to do most of the heavy lifting.
If you are a restaurant owner in Canada or the US already on Toast POS, everything you need to start filling slow shifts is already inside your account. You just need to switch it on.
Why Toast Email Marketing Is Different From Mailchimp or Klaviyo
Most restaurant owners either skip email marketing entirely or they set up a generic tool like Mailchimp and import a CSV they exported three years ago.
Toast email marketing is fundamentally different. It is built directly into your POS, which means every campaign you send is powered by real transaction data, not a static list.
Your guests are automatically added to your marketing database every time they order. Their visit history, frequency, average spend, and last visit date are all tracked inside Toast Guestbook. When you send a campaign, you are not guessing who your regulars are. You already know.
That is the advantage no third-party email tool can replicate. And it is why Toast POS marketing, when set up correctly, consistently outperforms generic email software for independent restaurant operators.
The Real Reason Your Toast Email Marketing Is Sitting Dormant
Before walking through the setup, it is worth naming the actual problem.
When most restaurants go live on Toast, they focus on the POS itself. The terminals, the menus, the payment flow. The marketing side of the dashboard is a different panel entirely, and nobody from the implementation team walks you through it.
So you end up with:
A growing guest database you have never sent a single email to
A loyalty program with hundreds of enrolled members who have never received a points reminder or a win-back offer
A ToastIQ AI tool that has been available since May 2025 and has never been opened
An email list that is billing you every month and producing zero revenue
This is not a technology problem. It is a setup problem. And it is exactly what we fix for restaurant clients across restaurant marketing Canada and restaurant marketing USA at Great Work Online.
Step 1: Access Toast Marketing in Your Dashboard
Log into your Toast Web Dashboard at pos.toasttab.com.
From the left-hand navigation, select Marketing. If you do not see this option, you may need to activate it under your subscription settings or confirm that Toast Email Marketing is part of your current plan.
Toast Email Marketing is available as an add-on at $75 USD/month. If you are not yet subscribed, activate it here. The return on a single well-targeted campaign more than covers the monthly cost. Toast's own data shows an average revenue lift of $2,800 in the 14 days following a single email campaign, with a 39% average open rate.
Once you are inside the Marketing dashboard, you will see several tabs: Campaigns, Audiences, Automations, and Reports. Leave Reports for now. Start with Audiences.
Step 2: Understand Your Audience Before You Send Anything
Your Toast Guestbook is the engine. Every time a guest places an order, dine-in, takeout, or online, Toast captures their contact information and transaction history.
Before your first campaign, spend ten minutes in Guestbook reviewing your data. Look at:
Total guest profiles: how many contacts have been captured?
Lapsed guests: who has not visited in 60 days or more?
High-frequency guests: who visits more than twice a month?
Loyalty members: how many guests are enrolled in your loyalty program and what is their redemption rate?
This is not busywork. These four audience segments are the foundation of every campaign you will build. The more you understand your actual guest behaviour before you start sending, the more precisely you can target, and the higher your open and redemption rates will be.
Most restaurants in Toronto, Vancouver, and across North America are sitting on 300 to 1,000+ guest profiles they have never contacted once. That is your revenue waiting to be activated.
Step 3: Configure Your Toast Loyalty Program First
If you have not set up Toast Loyalty, do this before you send your first email.
Here is why: a well-configured loyalty program turns a single email campaign into a re-engagement machine. When your lapsed guests receive an email with a double-points weekend or a personalised offer tied to their visit history, they are far more likely to act than if they receive a generic message.
Go to Marketing > Loyalty in your dashboard. Set your:
Points earn rate (how many dollars per point)
Redemption threshold (minimum points before a guest can redeem)
Automated birthday rewards: this single automation runs year-round and brings guests back on their birthday without you doing anything
Sign-up bonus: a welcome offer that incentivises new loyalty enrolments at point of sale
Once loyalty is active and integrated with your guest profiles, every campaign you send can reference a guest's points balance. This is the difference between a promotional email and a personalised retention campaign.
Step 4: Build Your First Email Campaign
Go to Marketing > Campaigns > Create New Campaign.
Toast gives you a template builder. You do not need a designer. You need a clear message and the right audience.
For your first campaign, keep it simple. Pick one of these proven starting points:
Option A: The Slow Night Campaign
Target: all guests who have visited in the last 90 days but not in the last 30. Offer a specific reason to come back on your quietest shift, Tuesday, Wednesday, or whichever night is slowest.
Subject line: "We miss you. Here is a reason to come back this Tuesday."
Option B: The Loyalty Reminder
Target: all loyalty members with unspent points. Let them know how many points they have and what they are worth as a discount.
Subject line: "You have [X] points. Here is what they are worth this week."
Option C: The Direct Order Incentive
Target: guests who have ordered via a delivery app. Offer a discount or bonus loyalty points for ordering directly from your website or in-store.
This campaign alone is one of the most direct ways to reduce DoorDash commissions and move guests onto a direct ordering channel where you keep the full margin.
Set your send time for mid-morning on the day before the shift you want to fill. Toast will handle the delivery.
Step 5: Switch On ToastIQ, The AI Tool Most Operators Have Never Opened
ToastIQ launched in May 2025 and most Toast operators have no idea it exists.
What is ToastIQ? It is Toast's AI-powered marketing assistant. It pulls your actual sales data, your best-selling items, your slowest shifts, your lapsed guest cohorts, and builds complete email, SMS, and social campaigns in minutes using that data.
You do not need to write copy. You do not need to know what to promote. ToastIQ reads your POS data and tells you what campaign to run and why.
Early users are reporting that campaigns built through ToastIQ's advertising integration are generating $8 in sales for every $1 spent. The tool runs on Meta and Google natively, meaning your promotions can reach diners within a specific radius of your restaurant without you managing a separate ad account.
To access it: go to Marketing > ToastIQ in your dashboard. The setup wizard walks you through connecting your sales data and building your first AI-generated campaign. It takes under 30 minutes to configure and activate.
If you have been paying for Toast marketing features and not using them, ToastIQ is the first thing to switch on.
Step 6: Set Up Automated Campaigns That Run Without You
Once your manual campaigns are working, build your automation layer. These run in the background every day without any input from you.
The three automations every restaurant should have active:
Birthday reward: sends a personalised offer to guests in the week before their birthday. High open rate, high redemption rate, zero ongoing effort.
Lapsed guest win-back: automatically sends a campaign to guests who have not visited in 45 to 60 days. The message is simple: "We have not seen you in a while. Here is a reason to come back." One re-engaged regular per week compounds into significant monthly revenue.
Post-visit loyalty nudge: sends a points balance reminder 24 hours after a guest visits. Keeps your loyalty program front of mind and drives repeat visits faster.
These three automations, running consistently, are the backbone of a Toast loyalty program restaurant strategy that does not require weekly attention. Set them up once. Let them run.
What Proper Toast Email Marketing Setup Actually Produces
Here is what changes when your Toast email marketing setup is fully configured and running:
Your Tuesday and Wednesday covers stop being your slowest of the week. Your delivery app dependency, and the 30% commission that comes with it, starts to drop as more guests order directly. Your loyalty programme stops being a badge your guests forget they have and starts being a genuine re-engagement tool. And your Toast POS marketing stops being a monthly line item that produces nothing and starts being the most cost-effective channel in your entire marketing mix.
The average revenue lift from a single Toast email campaign is $2,800 over 14 days. That number comes from Toast's own platform data. You are not spending more on ads to achieve it. You are using the guest data you have already collected.
Ready to Activate Your Toast Marketing, But Not Sure Where to Start?
The setup process above is straightforward if you have time to work through it. Most independent restaurant operators do not.
Great Work Online is a Toast restaurant marketing agency serving operators across Canada and the United States. We log into your Toast account directly, configure your email marketing, loyalty program, Guestbook segments, and ToastIQ from the inside, and run campaigns tied to your actual margins, not vanity metrics.
We work in partnership with Accountific, the bookkeeping firm built specifically for F&B operators. Every campaign we build is connected to real food cost and labour data. So when we fill your Tuesday nights, you know exactly what it is doing to your bottom line.
Download the free Toast Marketing Activation Checklist at greatworkonline.com/toast-activation-checklist. It covers the 10 Toast features your restaurant should have switched on right now and which three move the needle fastest.
Or book a free 30-minute Toast Marketing Audit at greatworkonline.com/toast-pos. We review your actual Toast account live, show you exactly what is dormant, and map out what activating it would do for your revenue. No pitch. No obligation. Just a clear plan.
Your Toast account is more powerful than you think. It just needs to be switched on.
Great Work Online is a digital marketing agency specialising in Toast POS marketing for independent restaurant owners across Canada and the United States. Founded by Pam Monteith. greatworkonline.com