Text message marketing & communication for restaurants, bars, lounges, and other food and beverage establishments is the most cost-effective & quickest method to reach your customers. In fact, 98% of all text messages are read and 90% of those messages are read in 3-minutes or less! Engaging your customer base utilizing text messaging will help promote daily specials, happy hour times, live music, coupons, and just about anything you can think of to your target customers and get their attention within minutes.

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!!!

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

Text Messaging Tips for Restaurants

  • 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.
  • 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.