Playbook: every restaurant in a city, and 300 emails in one afternoon

You sell something restaurants buy: a reservation system, a POS, wine, fish, linen, a website, vegetables three mornings a week. Your offer works. What you do not have is the list, and building it by hand is why the campaign keeps sliding to next month.

This is the version that fits in one afternoon. Search Madrid once, get every restaurant with a verified email where one exists, keep the 300 that match your offer, write one message, send it from your own mailbox, and put the rest in a spreadsheet.

Madrid is the example, but nothing below is specific to Madrid or to restaurants. Swap in Lisbon and dental clinics, and the afternoon is the same.

Step one: write your offer in one sentence

Do this before you touch the search, because the sentence decides everything after it. Not a paragraph. One sentence a stranger could repeat to a colleague.

Good: "We install a booking page on the restaurant's own website so guests reserve online and the kitchen is not answering the phone during service, with no commission per cover." Bad: "We provide innovative hospitality solutions." The second one cannot be turned into an email, because there is nothing in it for the reader.

The sentence also tells you who to contact. Read it back and ask which restaurants it is obviously not for. That is your filter for step four.

Step two: run the search

Type the type of business and the place: "restaurants in Madrid". The search reads the map at that moment, so it is not a list somebody exported last year. A place that opened in June is in your results; a place that closed in May is not.

Two things to set before you press start:

• The spending limit. Every search carries a limit you choose. The search stops when it hits your number, so the bill can never surprise you.
• The area. A city is the normal unit, but you can go down to a district or a single street, or up to a whole region.

Then you watch. Results stream in while the search runs, so you see the list grow. Each restaurant arrives with name, address, phone, website, rating and review count. While that happens, Leadralia also looks for the email address behind each business on the business's own website, verifies it for deliverability, and attaches it. Finding and verifying the email costs €0.00.

Say the search returns 1,800 restaurants. At €0.02 per business found, that list costs 1,800 x €0.02 = €36. The emails that came with it: €0.

Step three: read the results

You now have 1,800 rows and four columns that do the sorting for you.

Rating. Useful, but not on its own. A 4.9 from 12 reviews is a neighbourhood secret. A 4.3 from 900 reviews is a real business with real volume.

Review count. The closest thing to a size signal in public data. If your offer needs turnover (a POS, a reservation system, a wholesale account), review count sorts the list faster than anything else. If your offer is for small places, sort the other way.

Website present or not. A restaurant with no website usually takes bookings by phone. That is either your best prospect (if you sell the website or the booking page) or your worst (if your product plugs into one).

Email found or not. Leadralia reads the business's own site for the address and verifies it. It never guesses from a name pattern, so an empty field means no working public address exists. Those rows are not dead: they still have a phone and an address, so they are a call list.

Step four: pick the 300

Put the sentence from step one next to the list and cut.

For the reservation system: keep restaurants with more than 150 reviews (they are busy), with a website (somewhere to put the booking page), and with an email found. Sort by review count, take the top 300, and read twenty names to check you did not get cafeterias and hotel bars.

For the food wholesaler the filter is different. Reviews still signal volume, a website matters less, and you may want to cut the chains, because a chain buys centrally.

Three hundred is not a magic number. It is a number you can follow up properly. If you cannot handle 300 replies next week, send 100 and keep the rest.

Step five: let the AI draft it, then edit it

Paste your one sentence into Leadralia and the built in AI writes the outreach message from it: you supply the offer, it supplies the first draft in your tone. Then you read every word and change what is wrong, because the AI knows your offer only as well as your sentence described it.

Here is an example of what a human would plausibly send to a Madrid restaurant, written by a company selling a reservation system. It is an example, not a template to copy word for word.

Subject: bookings without the phone ringing during service

Hola Marta,

I saw that Casa Lucia takes reservations by phone. With that many reviews, I imagine it rings right when the kitchen is busiest.

We set up a booking page on your own website. Guests choose a time themselves, the list appears on your phone, and there is no commission per cover. It takes about an hour to set up and nothing changes for guests who still want to call.

If it is useful, I can set it up before next weekend and you decide after two weeks whether to keep it.

Thanks for your time, Luis

Around 100 words: one specific observation, one sentence on what it does, one easy next step. Edit it until it sounds like you, then approve. Every message ends with a one-line source sentence and a simple way out (send "no" to the address at the bottom), so you do not write that part.

What this email will get you, we cannot tell you. Results depend on your offer, your message, your timing and your name. Anyone who quotes you a reply rate before you send is guessing.

Step six: check the audience and the cost screen

Before anything goes out, Leadralia shows exactly who is about to receive the message and exactly what it will cost. Read it. This is where you catch that your filter kept 340 rows instead of 300, or that a test address is still in the list.

Three hundred emails at €0.05 each is 300 x €0.05 = €15. If a send fails, that €0.05 comes back to your wallet automatically and the dead address is remembered, so you never pay twice.

Step seven: send from your own mailbox

Emails go out from your mailbox, not from a shared pool. Connect Gmail or Outlook with one click, use any SMTP mailbox, or send from your own domain. Every address is deliverability checked before a send is possible.

That matters practically: replies come back to an address you already read, and the message carries your name and your domain.

Step eight: replies, follow ups and the leftovers

Replies land in an inbox inside Leadralia, next to the lead they belong to. Each lead carries a status, a note and a follow up date. Set the date while you read the reply, not later: "call back after 15 October" on the one who is renovating, "send pricing Monday" on the one who asked.

The 1,500 restaurants you did not email are already paid for. Export them to Excel or CSV, or leave them in Leadralia and send the second batch next week. You can also see them on a map, which helps when the follow up is a visit.

The whole afternoon in one table

One afternoon, €51, a live list of 1,800 Madrid restaurants that stays yours, and your offer in 300 inboxes. Top up the wallet from €5 by card; the balance never expires. The free tier covers 25 searches and 25 email sends a month, no card.

Mistakes to avoid

Emailing all 1,800 because you can. That is €90 and a week of replies you cannot answer properly. Send what you can follow up.

Skipping the edit. Sent unread, an AI draft will eventually say something untrue about a restaurant, and the reader will notice before you do.

One message for two audiences. Busy restaurants with a website and small places without one need different emails. Run two sends rather than one message that fits neither.

Filtering on rating alone. Sort by review count first and use rating to break ties. Rating without volume is noise.

Treating an empty email field as a failure. It is a phone list. For a supplier in the same city, a call at 16:00, between lunch and dinner service, often beats an email anyway.

Forgetting the follow up date. Most replies are "not now". A lead with a date comes back to you. A lead without one does not.

Do it again next month

This is the part that compounds. A business you already have costs €0.00 in any later search, forever. Re run "restaurants in Madrid" in October and you pay only for what is new since September.

If 60 restaurants appeared since your first sweep, the second scan costs 60 x €0.02 = €1.20. Their emails are found and verified for free, as always. Email all 60 and that is 60 x €0.05 = €3. A current list of Madrid for €4.20 a month, plus whatever you choose to send.

The same rule makes widening cheap. Run "restaurants in Getafe", then "restaurants in Alcala de Henares", and the overlap with what you already have costs nothing. Over a few months you own a live map of your market instead of a spreadsheet that ages from day one.

Questions people ask

Is it legal to email these restaurants? Leadralia uses public business data only: the business's public listing and its own website, no bought databases and no data brokers. Every message ends with a one-line source sentence (the business details come from public online sources) and a simple way out: send "no" to the address at the bottom and nothing more arrives (mail to Belgium also carries an unsubscribe link). A business can also ask to be removed through a self serve portal, instantly. Leadralia works under GDPR.

What if the search finds more restaurants than I expected? That is what the spending limit is for. You set it before the search starts, so 1,800 results can never quietly become 4,000 on the invoice.

Can I use the email addresses outside Leadralia? Yes. Revealing an address to use elsewhere costs €0.02 each, against €0.05 to send through Leadralia, which reveals the address for free at the same time. For a message you were going to send anyway, that difference buys the deliverability check and keeps the replies, the unsubscribes and the follow ups in one place.

Bottom line

The reason most of these campaigns never happen is the list, not the writing. One search gives you every restaurant in Madrid, live, with a verified email wherever a public one exists, and duplicates are free forever after.

The rest is an afternoon of judgment, which is the part you are good at. Write the sentence, cut to 300, edit the draft until it sounds like you, send it from your own mailbox, and put a date on every reply.

For the full tour of the product, read what Leadralia does. To just see your own city, run one search for free. It is free to try, and no card is needed.