If you’re a restaurant, fast-food establishment or local eatery owner, you know that getting customers through the door is a constant focus of your business.
Even when business is good, there are always those quieter times of day when it can be hard to get enough patrons into those seats.
Using mass texts is one way your eatery can draw in more customers, get people excited about your food, and entice them with special offers and exclusive deals.
So just how can you use text marketing to increase your eatery’s revenue? And what are some examples of restaurants that are already doing just that?
Text Marketing Gets Customers’ Attention
As the article “Mass Consumer Texts Driving Up Sales At Restaurants” points out, using text marketing means you can reach a large number of potential customers in your immediate vicinity.
A text message has a personal feel. Unlike an online ad or billboard, a text message arrives directly in front of each customer, inviting them to open and read it, and grabbing their full attention for a few minutes.
Text marketing gives you the chance to start a personal interaction with each customer, putting your restaurant and food at the forefront of their mind, and ensuring they’ll think of you when it’s time to grab lunch or dinner.
Text Marketing Gives Them a Reason to do Business
The beauty of text marketing is that you can use it to entice your customers to eat with you. Text marketing is the perfect vehicle for sending them delicious offers, such as buy one get one free deals, or money off coupons.
If you particularly want to increase revenue at a quieter time of the day or week, you can use text marketing to send out time limited offers for those periods, encouraging people to come and eat with you at that time.
In addition, why not consider sending out weekly specials, daily discount coupons, text-to-win sweepstakes, or even conducting surveys to find out what your customers think of your restaurant, what works and what doesn’t.
Eateries Finding Success with Text Marketing
Several big-name eateries have already seen success with text marketing:
- McDonald’s used a text-based sweepstakes competition with a wide range of prizes. 1.5 million customers joined in, showing that text marketing can be very effective indeed;
- Chuck E. Cheese used text message marketing to encourage customers to join their email list – not only did it become the most successful method for getting customers on the list, but customers who joined via text were more likely to open the emails than any other customers;
- UK pizza place Papa John’s sent out text offers for cut-price pizzas to customers on their text list, and saw a 33% jump in revenue for the duration of the offer;
- Dunkin’ Donuts asked their customers to join their mobile marketing list, and got a fantastic response, with stores in the Boston area seeing 21% more customers walk through their doors;
- Taco Bell branched out into using mobile marketing to connect with their customers, offering a free drink to those who opted in to their mobile marketing list. As a result, they garnered 13000 subscribers.
Text marketing is an immediate way to reach many customers quickly and easily, and it’s frequently more cost effective than other forms of direct marketing.
By reaching your customers when they’re out and about you can encourage them to stop off at your establishment and take advantage of your special offers.
Photo credit: Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
About the Author: Tristan Anwyn writes on a wide variety of topics, including social media, SEO, restaurant businesses and SMS marketing.
