What Text Message Marketing Can Cook Up for Your Restaurant

Are you looking for a way to engage with customers and get more butts in seats at your restaurant? Maybe, with COVID-19 still raging in many parts of the country, you want to promote more take-out deals and encourage more curbside pickup. Perhaps you’re changing your seating arrangements — adding a bar or installing a patio, for example — and want to disseminate that info to your customers. Text message marketing can help you achieve all that and more.

You have to get permission from customers to be able to send them marketing messages directly to their cell phones, but it’s worth it for the high level of engagement you can enjoy from these targeted messages. Text message marketing is far more effective than advertising on television or even on social media or popular websites, because it cuts through all the noise to reach customers exactly where they are — reading their text messages. Everyone texts all the time — it’s the most popular form of communication. And customers appreciate the exclusive deals and access they get from SMS loyalty programs.

Customers Want to Text You

Customers overwhelmingly prefer to communicate with businesses via text message — and that’s a big part of the reason why they open 98 percent of the text messages they receive, even when they’re from a business. Customers also know that text messages they receive from businesses are likely to be credible and not spammy, thanks to consumer protections, like the TCPA and the CAN-SPAM Act, that regulate how businesses can market to consumers over the phone. You have to get permission to send customers marketing texts, you have to disclose how often you plan to send texts, and you have to give the customers a clear path to opt out if they change their minds.

Furthermore, you can’t send marketing texts that aren’t relevant to your business, and it’s best practice to create value for the customer, anyway. Customers enjoy signing up for SMS loyalty programs, because they know they’ll get good deals they can’t get anywhere else. Most people who opt in to text marketing programs are happy with what they get out of them.

Give Them Something to Feel Loyal To

Text message marketing is great for restaurants that want to turn casual customers into loyal regulars. With text marketing, you can send promotions, coupons, and specials directly to the segments of your customer base that would be most interested. Reach out to younger customers via text with student discounts to turn your cafe into a hip college hangout. Send your lunch specials and free dessert coupons to working adults and those with young families.

 Customers these days prefer personalized ads and want marketers to cater to their interests. By giving them exclusive deals only available to customers who opt in to text messages, you create some incentive for customers who like your food to subscribe and get access to that value. By segmenting your subscriber list, you can further tailor your marketing text messages to appeal to the unique sensibilities of each group.

Offer Surveys, Contests, and More

Text message marketing is more than just an avenue to bombard your customers with coupons for free wings. It’s a point of contact you can use to strengthen the customer relationship. You can send customer surveys a few hours or a day after a meal is eaten, to collect more data on what customers do and don’t like about your restaurant and what you might change to improve the customer experience. 

You can use text keywords to confirm customer bookings and even make it easier for customers to book tables, or cancel a reservation, by allowing them to do it over text. Most customers might not think it’s worth the trouble to call to cancel a booking, or they might forget to do so. But if they receive a confirmation text the night before, they’ll get both a reminder and an easy avenue to confirm or cancel the booking — and that could mean fewer no-shows for you.

Contests are another great way to engage with customers, and get more customers to sign up. The chance of a prize can be enough to get many people to subscribe to text messages, and if it’s something simple like a cup of coffee, you can afford to give away enough of them that customers won’t feel cheated.

Text marketing is a great way to get more customers coming into your restaurant — again and again. With a few targeted texts a month, you could see your customer base grow steadily, and save money on marketing, too.

The post What Text Message Marketing Can Cook Up for Your Restaurant first appeared on Feedster.

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