The only thing harder than running a successful restaurant is making sure that you are maintaining a loyal customer base while also consistently bringing in new customers. SMS marketing can be a powerful tool to help you do just that.
SMS messages have a much higher open rate than email, so it is a more effective way to communicate with your customers and let them know about new menu items and promotions you’re offering.
There are many opportunities to promote your restaurant in different contexts. You can promote the restaurant itself and advertise specific menu items, and you can also incorporate external sources like local events and charities into your marketing strategy that will ultimately be beneficial for everyone involved.
Below we will go over a few beneficial opportunities and break down each into a few subsections.
Remember that a customer must agree to receive messages from your company in order for you to remain compliant with the TCPA, and to send opt-out messages occasionally.
Mother's Day promotion ideas for restaurants often look the same. Stand out by doing something different, like creating a special menu or encouraging customers to tag their mothers on social media to win a gift card.
If your restaurant is located close to a sporting arena or has local high schools or colleges, you can take advantage of a big game or cross-town rivalry and offer discounts for customers who show their tickets.
You can give back to the community by helping a family in need, a local school, or fundraising for a well-known charity. This will give your restaurant some good PR, while also generating positive relationships with the community and giving to a good cause.
If you are launching a new menu item and want to get the word out about it, an SMS blast can let your customers know that you’re updating your menu and keeping up with seasonal produce.
You can decrease your food waste and increase your sales on unpopular items by promoting them and also pairing them with your best-sellers at a discount.
You can increase sales during the slowest times of the day by offering discounts or special promotions to encourage customers to come in. Early bird specials or late-night happy hours are commonly used promotions.
A great way of increasing repeat customers is to offer punch cards, where every time a customer makes a purchase, they get a hole punch or a stamp on their card, and after a certain number of purchases, they are rewarded with a free item.
A tiered discount means that you offer a bigger discount for each larger purchase. For example, $5 off purchase of $50, $10 off purchase of $100, etc. This is a great way to get more orders because the more they order, the more they save!
Give your customers a free treat when they make a purchase, such as a small dessert when they order an entree. This can also be used to increase sales on less popular items, as the customer is incentivized to order it to get the freebie.
Running a restaurant can be chaotic and stressful, but marketing it doesn’t have to be. SMS marketing is a cost-effective, easy way to get the word out about your food and attract new customers. You can use one of the mother's day promotion ideas for restaurants above and set up an automated message and Texting Base will do the rest for you.
Find out just how much SMS marketing can do for your restaurant by starting your free trial of Texting Base today!