TEXT MESSAGE MARKETING FOR restaurants
Text Message Marketing for Restaurants Stats:
- Taco Bell fast food had 13,000 mobile opt-ins in the first 5 weeks
- Papa Murphy’s Pizza SMS ads had a 17.9% return rate
- Subway restaurants had a 9% SMS coupon redemption, compared to 1% with direct mail
- Pizza Hut Pizza mobile marketing was 142% more efficient than other marketing channels
- Carl’s Jr. hamburgers generated $14 in new sales for every $1 spent on their text marketing campaign
Get Started in 4 Easy Steps:
- Start our 15-day free trial here. There’s no credit card required and this will allow you to test the system and how it will work for your restaurant without any obligation.
- Upon signing up for your trial, you’ll be asked to choose your Keyword. The keyword will be the word that people text in to join your text group. A lot of people choose their business name or a word commonly associated with their business. For example, Joe’s Pizza could choose Joes or Pizza as their keyword. *Tip, avoid choosing a keyword that will auto-correct or is hard to spell.
3. Decide whether or not you’d like to set up an auto-responder. The auto-response message is the message that anyone who joins your text club will be automatically texted when they text in to join your list. You choose what the message says and you can change the auto-response message at any time.
4. Promote your text group. The true key to success with having a text message club is gaining as many members as possible. That way when you’re having a slow day or simply want to increase business, you can send out a text to your group members and get your message seen within minutes.
How Restaurants Gain Text Message Group Members
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Printed Materials in Your Restaurant: This is one of the quickest ways to gain opt-ins to your text group. Place your opt-in instructions on table tents, flyers, on receipts, and business cards
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Train your servers or cashier to offer the incentive to join to each customer while they are paying
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Place your opt-in instructions on all of your social media and make regular posts about it
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Put instructions on your website or use our web widget to gather opt-ins from your website automatically
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If you do print campaigns, place your opt-in instructions on those. You can even make the offer a text in to redeem for better results
Text Message Ideas for Restaurants:
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Weekly or Daily Specials
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Coupons – Example: Buy an entree and two drinks, get the second entree free
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Special Events or Live Music Nights
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New Hours or Holiday Hour Information
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Contests – A great way to get people to join your text list is to do a contest. Example, “Join our text club for a chance to win a monthly giveaway for a dinner for 2!” This way, you aren’t always giving something away but people enjoy the chance to win
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Polls – Ask your customers to weigh in on their favorite items or ask what new item they’d like to order. See the results live in your dashboard
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Send shortened links to your website or social media pages
Text Messaging Tips for Restaurants
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Make sure to send something of value. When your customers sign up to receive texts from you, they’re allowing you to contact them on their personal cell phone. Make sure to think of what types of messages/offers you’d appreciate from your favorite restaurants. It doesn’t always have to include a discount.
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Don’t overdo it. Make sure not to spam your customers by texting them too much. We recommend 6-8 texts a month for restaurants. We find that a lot of our clients that are restaurants send 1 message per week and see great results.
SCRATCHER IDEAS FOR RESTAURANTS
Mobile Scratchers are perfect for restaurants! You can post a flyer at your POS saying "Win dinner for 2, text DINNER to 52236 for your chance to win". You train your whole staff to promote it!
The benefits of having people text in for a chance to win is everyone is a winner! Even if they don't win the free dinner you can still give them a percentage off or a free drink! The best part of the feature is everyone who texts in will now be in your database so your traditional slow days turn into busy days because you send every person in your database a special to get them in!
Imagine being able to send a special directly to 10,000 peoples phones, with current statistics 9,700 people will open that text in the first 3 minutes! Unlike social media's algorithms, the text will be delivered right to your target customers eyes! We won't even go into emails open rates as you still have to get by the spam filters!
Test it out here! Click here or text WINDEMO to 52236