The restaurant industry is fast paced and highly competitive. As a business owner you have many priorities and attracting and retaining customers is key.

SMS marketing can help you to:

1. Create a simple campaign to acquire new customers
2. Target offers to retain your existing client base and grow sales during quiet periods in the business
3. Provide better service by text messaging reservations to your customers
4. Provide a substantial return on investment compared to traditional forms of marketing – email, newspaper ads or radio.

SMS marketing is great for busy business owners to target their busy customers. A short and ‘to the point’  message takes seconds to read and can generate a response just as quickly, whereas traditional means of marketing communications; emails and newspaper advertising, even a telephone campaign, take a great deal of time to organise and can be costly too.

From around 4p per message, texting is also by far the cheapest means of communicating with your customers. Take email for example. It will take someone time to create a great email marketing campaign. Unfortunately, only 25% of emails are read compared 95% of text messages.

As well as generating more people into your restaurant, you can also use the 2Ergo Broadcast system to manage your reservations. The benefits of this are that it looks very professional, and you can reduce the number of costly no-shows to your business.

Is texting right for my business?

The simple answer is that SMS/text marketing can be beneficial to any restaurant. The real advantage of SMS marketing is that it’s cheap and scalable; anyone can do it and to any number of contacts so it really doesn’t matter how big or small your restaurant is, texting can benefit you.

Acquire more business

•  SMS your current database, offering 10% discount this weekend only of the bill
•  Offer extra incentives to fill up your covers, such as free bottle of house wine on Tuesday
•  10% off all bookings for Mondays
•  Send birthday messages to lost clients offering a free birthday drink with any meal
• Take advantage of cancelled reservations by texting your database offering a 20% reduction off the bill if booked within 24 hours
• Run a competition asking clients for referrals. Send out a discount text message and tell your clients they can pass it on to friends and family

Improve your customer service

•  SMS reservation  reminders to give that extra service and reduce no-shows
•  Generate feedback and measure service – give your customer the opportunity to fill out a feedback card and leave their mobile number. This will help you measure service and you could then offer 10% off the next visit for customers who may have experienced poor service.

Knowing what to write

Text messages can only be 160 characters (including spaces) long, so there’s no room for waffling.

It’s important that you get to the point quickly and that the client understands exactly what you’re

offering them. As a rule, you should make sure that once you have created your message, it answers

these three key questions;

1) Why you are contacting them – e.g. what offer are you making?

2) When should they act? – e.g. is there a closing date for your offer or promotion?

3) What do they need to do next? e.g. call or visit your restaurant

It’s important to keep the style of your messages friendly and chatty but at the same time, your message is clear and concise. Here are a few examples;

Example booking reminder message;

Hi Dave, you have a table booked with us on Friday at 8pm

Looking forward to seeing you then!

Giovanni’s Restaurant 01234 567891

Once you have decided on how you want to use texting in your restaurant, and the content of your texts, you can determine how often you will need to contact clients and what your average usage of text messaging will be.

Something else to consider before you embark on an SMS marketing campaign is: who should manage your SMS marketing? Who in your salon should be given the responsibility of maintaining your client database and ensuring the right messages are sent to the right people?

In truth, there is only really one answer to this question. Your client contact database, in particular the mobile numbers it contains should be be highly protected. Only the restaurant manager should be able to access this and they should have the final say on the content of messages and when and who will receive them.

Find out more by contacting us via the website http://www.crowd-connect.co.uk and lets talk!