If you've got a Facebook page with a few thousand followers, you've got something. I'm not going to tell you it's worthless. Mine still does work for me, six years in.
But it isn't a list. A follower is somebody Facebook lets you reach when Facebook feels like it. The day you stop paying to boost, most of them never see you again, and there's nothing you can do about it because you never had their email or their number. You had a number on a page that belongs to somebody else.
A list is the part you own. Nobody can raise the rate on an email address. It works the month you decide not to spend anything. And building one on a truck is easier than anywhere else in food, because you've got something a restaurant would kill for: people standing in front of you with four minutes to fill.
The card in the window
Our first year we picked up about 1,200 people. No ad spend, no contest, no clever hook. A QR code on a card, taped where the line forms, and whoever's at the window saying “scan that if you want to know when we're near you.”
That's it. They're already looking at their phone while they wait. You're giving them something to do with it.
Where you put it matters more than what it looks like. It goes where people stand while they're waiting, at eye level, not on the menu board where they're busy reading. If your line forms on the side of the truck, the card goes on the side of the truck. A second one by the pickup window catches the people who didn't scan the first time.
What to say
One sentence, and it's the same sentence every time. “Scan that if you want to know when we're near you.” Not “sign up for our newsletter.” Nobody wants a newsletter. They want to know when the truck's coming back, and that's exactly what you're offering.
Say it while you're handing them the food or taking the order. It's not a pitch. It's the same as telling them the sauce is hot.
What the form asks for
Keep it short or they'll bail. Ours asks for an email, a zip code, and whether they want texts too. First name if they feel like it.
The zip is the one people skip and it's the one that matters most. It's how you know who's near a stop later. Somebody in Sterling doesn't need to hear about Wray. When you can send a stop to the people who live around it and nobody else, they keep opening what you send. Blast everybody about every town and they stop opening anything.
The texts question has to be its own checkbox that they tick themselves. Not pre-checked. I'll get to why.
The first fifty names
The first fifty feel like nothing. Send to them anyway. The point isn't the fifty people, it's getting into the habit of telling your list where you'll be before every stop, so that when it's five hundred you're not starting from scratch.
Send it a day or two ahead. Where, what day, what hours, and how to order if you take orders online. That's the whole email. Somebody who signed up at your window doesn't need convincing. They need the time and the address.
Don't buy one, don't borrow one
Every so often somebody offers to sell you a list of local emails, or you think about scraping a page. Don't. Nobody on a bought list ever ate your food, so they don't open, they mark you as spam, and enough of that gets your real emails filtered too. The whole reason the window works is that every name on it already chose you once.
Texting is a different deal
This is the part I learned the expensive way. When I moved off Constant Contact I brought over years of contacts, and a lot of them had a phone number on file. Around fourteen hundred of them. I couldn't text a single one.
An email address someone gave you is yours to email. A phone number is not yours to text unless they specifically said yes to texts. Not in a form footer, not buried in terms. A box they ticked. The carriers make every business register before it can text at all, and texting people who didn't clearly opt in isn't a gray area, it's a fine.
So the texts checkbox on your form is doing real work. Everybody who ticks it is somebody you can text on the morning of a stop, and those are the messages people actually act on. Everybody who doesn't, you email. Both are fine. Just don't mix them up.
Bring over what you've already got
If you've been collecting emails somewhere, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, a spreadsheet, a jar of business cards, that counts. Export it and import it. Those people already said yes once. Just remember the phone numbers in there don't come with texting permission unless they said so at the time, and most didn't.
What I'd tell you to do
Put a card up this week. Not after you've got a website. Not after you've picked a logo. This week, because every stop you run without one is names you're never getting back.
Say the one sentence at the window until it's automatic.
Ask for the zip. Make texts a box they tick.
Send to the list before every stop, even when it's fifty people.
Keep boosting if boosting works for you. Just build the thing you own next to it, because it's the one that's still there when you stop paying.
That's what the signup kit in Nearby Notify is. The card for the window, a page for the QR code to point at, the form with the zip and the texts box already on it, and the zip does the sorting so each stop only goes to the people near it.