We aren’t sure how we have done it, we think it’s probably magic, yeah let’s go with that. But over the past month, we have seen an increasing number of restaurants sign up and start sending SMS messages through us. These messages have varied from promoting events and offers, to general updates, and we can see they have been incredibly successful.
One of the main reasons behind the huge success these restaurants are having is the incredible 98% open rate that SMS marketing can boost. No other marketing channel can give you these numbers, and if we said that 98% of your customers would read your message, and an incredible 90% of these messages would be read within the first 3 minutes, what would you say?
Magic? Witchcraft? Nope – that’s just SMS marketing for you.
There are loads of different ways that restaurants can use SMS to help boost revenue, customer loyalty and brand awareness, but instead of taking you through examples of these or throwing more amazing SMS marketing stats at you, we are going to tell you a little story about our friend called Bob, and how SMS marketing turned him into a loyal customer and advocate.
Bob loves to go out and eat, every lunch Bob goes to a different restaurant to sit back, relax, and get served some delicious food. Bob tries to go to different places each day and rarely goes back to the same restaurant each week.
One day Bob tries this new place, Nice Food. Not a great name but Bob thought he would give it a try. Bob ate his food, enjoyed it, and filled in a feedback form with his name and number on and left. There wasn’t anything special about Nice Food, as the name suggests, it just served nice food.
The next day, Bob wakes to the sun shining, the birds tweeting (not Twitter) and a smile on his face. He gets to work, sits down and begins his day job. At 11.50am Bob receives a text message, it’s from Nice Food…
“Hi Bob, thank you for visiting us yesterday, we hope you enjoyed your meal. As a way of saying thank you, we are giving you a free dessert of your choice if you come by again this lunchtime”
A free dessert Bob thinks, why yes that would be lovely.
Lunchtime arrives and off he goes to Nice Food, he sits down, orders his main course and shows the waiter the text message he received, he picks out the Chocolate Fudge Cake, Bob’s favourite dessert, eats it and goes back to work.
A few days have passed now, and of course, it has been raining, that’s England for you. Bob is sat at work looking outside at the dark skies and drizzle, he really doesn’t want to go out for lunch but hasn’t brought in any food. All of a sudden, his phone starts buzzing. It’s a message from Nice Food, Bob remembers the last time he got a message from them it was offering a free dessert, before opening the message he is excited to see what offer they are going to give him this time.
“2 for 1 on all main courses today only – come in and try our new ‘Mega Awesome Beef Burger for only £13.99 including 2 sides”
The first thing Bob thinks about is that they really need a better name for their burger, but he doesn’t care and tells his friend Brenda about the offer and at lunch time, they grab their umbrellas and head down.
They enjoy a lovely meal together, and before they leave Bob tells Brenda to fill in the feedback form and give them her number, as this means she can receive the text messages with offers on that he has been getting.
2 years have passed and Bob is now a regular at Nice Food, he goes twice a week even if he hasn’t received an offer, he still enjoys the food. Bob has told his friends and family about the amazing offers that Nice Food sends you via text message, and all his friends have signed up and are receiving special offers and discounts.
Nice Food has now opened 2 more stores across the country and are looking to expand even more. They have scrapped the paper-based feedback forms and instead use an SMS survey that they send to their customers 30 minutes after they have left.
They have a sign-up form to their SMS loyalty program on their website, along with regular text to win competitions, you can also book a reservation via text message and they will send you a confirmation text with the reservation details on the day before, just in case you forget.
This has all come from just a simple text message offering a free dessert, that turned a one-off customer into a regular.
Hopefully you can see the power behind SMS marketing, and that it be a huge benefactor to restaurants and can keep customers coming back to you, instead of going to a competitor.
If after reading this you want to sign up for a free account, click here, and if after reading this you are hungry, we are sorry – now where’s that chocolate fudge cake gone.