Text Message Marketing for Restaurants

Below, you’ll see how large restaurant chains are using the same technology we offer at TXT180 with amazing results!

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

As you can see, the potential with text message marketing for restaurants is very significant! It’s more cost effective than direct mail, print ads, and has up to 10X higher coupon redemption rates!!!

Get Started in 4 Easy Steps:

1- 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.

2- 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

The best way to get people to join your restaurant’s text club is to use an incentive to join. Everyone enjoys something to sweeten the deal. You could offer to comp the sodas on the ticket, 10% off, a BOGO offer, or whatever works best for your establishment. The better the offer, the higher the response will be. We recommend offering something that will seem of high value to your customers but is a low cost to your business to give away. Sodas are a great example.

• 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

• Train your servers or cashier to offer the incentive to join to each customer while they are paying

• Place your opt-in instructions on all of your social media and make regular posts about it

• Put instructions on your website or use our web widget to gather opt-ins from your website automatically

• 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:

• Weekly or Daily Specials

• Coupons – Example: Buy an entree and two drinks, get the second entree free

• Special Events or Live Music Nights

• New Hours or Holiday Hour Information

• 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

• 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

• Send shortened links to your website or social media pages

Save Time Marketing & Communicating with Customers

Another great perk of using text messaging software is that you have so many features built in to optimize your restaurant’s results. Send messages on demand or schedule messages days, weeks, or months in advance to automate your marketing and messaging. Go through the calendar and set up all of your holiday & specials texts at once and then rest assured that your text will be sent to all current members of your text list on the scheduled date.

Drip messages are another way to automate your restaurant’s marketing. A drip message simply means messages that are scheduled to go out based on the date someone joined your text list. For example, all members could receive the 10% offer joining your text club. Then you can set the next message to go out 5 days later with either another offer or just a reminder of what your weekly specials are. Each person who joins your club will receive that second message 5 days after they joined the club. You can set as many drip messages as you’d like. This ensures all members of your club receive the same messages at the same increments of time, based on the time they joined.

The inbox is a great way to automate customer service. The inbox feature is 2-way text enabled so if a customer texts your club back asking what your hours are or if you’ll be open for Thanksgiving, you have the chance to respond via text message which has become the preferred method of contact for many. Our inbox feature can alert of the message to your personal cell phone or email.

Use our message templates to save messages you may want to send out another time to save time having to re-enter the text information.

The dynamic date feature is great for restaurants that want to offer coupons via text message. The dynamic date can be entered into your text message, for example, Recieve a FREE breadstick with purchase of a slice and a drink expires +7 days. The +7 days is the dynamic date. Our software will automatically calculate what the date will be in 7 days from the time you sent the text message so that you can ensure that it will be set to expire in 7 days from the time they received the message.

These are a few examples of the bulk text messaging features that our software includes. To view the full list of texting features click here.

Text Messaging Tips for Restaurants

1. 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.

2. 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.

If you’re new text bulk text messaging all of this can feel overwhelming but we promise once you get going it’s a lot easier than it seems. We recommend if you’re new that you utilize our complimentary Customer Success Managers to help you set up your account and go over ideas on how to integrate texting for your restaurant so that you know you’ll be set up for success and save time.

More Mass Text Messaging Statistics

10x the redemption rate of print coupons
90% of customers part of a text club felt that it was valuable
70% of US consumers say they’d like to receive offers via text
Over 6 billion text messages are sent each day in the USA
Text messaging is the most common cell phone activity
Texts have a 45% average response rate versus email has only a 6% response rate

Conclusion

SMS Marketing for restaurants has been proven to be highly effective. The sooner you start and the better you promote it, the better your results will be. Text messaging is only growing in usage and popularity every day. Utilize that fact to generate more revenue and customers for your restaurant. If you have any questions about how this can work for you please reach out to our team and we’re more than happy to help you.

Originally Posted on: September 9, 2021

Posted in: SMS Marketing Uses by Industry
Tags: restaurant loyalty program, restaurant sms, sms marketing, text message customers, text message marketing restaurants