SMS for Restaurants
As a customer, the range of restaurants is amazing, there is a perfect choice for every occasion. Whether you want a quick bite to eat or a three-course meal, a salad or a steak there will be the ideal restaurant just around the corner. However, because of the increased competition, it is essential for restaurants to be on top form. This means providing the best experience for the customer as well as marketing to your database. This is where FireText comes in, we offer the perfect platform to help increase sales while maintaining the best customer service.
How FireText can help:
As a restaurant, there are three key things to concentrate on, standing out from the competition, attracting new customers and ensuring that the customers return. FireText’s SMS platform can help with all three of these aspects in a cost and time-efficient manner. As an example, one awesome SMS feature that we have is our custom fields, this essentially allows you to send out a bulk text campaign to multiple people, however, instead of sending out a generic text message you can include custom fields to add personalisation. This could simply be including their name, or if you have gathered more information regarding your existing and potential customers from previous campaigns, you could send out a targeted message regarding their favourite meals. By adding that personal touch, you will find that your SMS marketing campaigns immediately stand out from competitors.
As well as this, when a customer makes a reservation you want to prevent ‘no shows’ you can use SMS to initially send them a thank you text message for making a reservation with you, to boost your customer service. Then the day of their booking you can decide to send a follow-up SMS message, highlighting that you are looking forward to seeing them, this gives them a gentle reminder about their reservation in order to reduce missed bookings. The last thing you want to be left with is empty tables and SMS is the perfect way to reduce this!
SMS is an instant direct channel, which is one of the reasons why it receives such a great response rate and as a restaurant owner, you can use this to your advantage. If you’re expecting a slow day and want to boost your numbers, you can send out a last-minute bulk SMS campaign including a discounted offer, to your database. This will encourage your existing customers to pop down for lunch and increase footfall, rather than having empty tables remaining.
SMS Marketing is an awesome resource for your team and the perfect addition to your marketing mix. Below is a summary which highlights a few ways you can use SMS for your restaurant.
- Use SMS text messaging to send out booking confirmations and reminders. This will help to build a relationship between your customers and your brand, while also preventing ‘no shows’ and empty tables.
- Encourage referrals by sending our discount codes via SMS to existing customers, if they bring their friends and family on their next visit. This will encourage word of mouth marketing which is extremely valuable for any business.
- Use SMS marketing to send out personalised messages to your customers, this could be discounts on their favourite food, information about an upcoming event you are holding or simply addressing them directly.
If you wanted to chat through some plans for how you can use SMS for your restaurant then please just give us a shout. Our team are on standby to help out with any questions or queries you may have. :-)