3 Extremely Effective SMS Marketing Messages For Restaurants
Daniel Flynn
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Text messaging is a highly effective marketing tool for restaurant owners to drive foot traffic through their doors. However, as explained in our previous article, “The Best Approach To Text Message Marketing For Restaurants”, SMS marketing for restaurants is even more effective when you send offers based on how often or how much a customer spends during a visit.
Such a level of segmentation is key to personalizing the offer to each customer & maximizing the ROI generated by your restaurant’s customers.
Nevertheless, once you have a substantial texting list, you’ll want to use the right mix of marketing messages to make the most of your restaurant’s SMS campaign.
1. Offers Based On Past Purchasing Behavior
As explained, some of the most effective marketing messages for restaurants are triggered by the customer’s past purchasing behavior. The primary reason for this is that it makes consumers feel like every dollar they spend matters because they are constantly earning rewards.
As you’ll find, payments-related offers positively reinforce your customers’ decision to visit your business.
Purchasing behavior-based offers include:
- Punchcard offers
- Come back offers
- Top spender offers
- Casual, regular & VIP offers
How to implement payments-based offers
In order to implement payments-based offers, you’ll need to find a rewards program that integrates with your payment technology. The integration allows you to use your customer’s purchasing behavior to trigger the sending of offers.
Primary benefit: maximized ROI
Due to award personalization, you’ll maximize the ROI you generate from the offers you make. Primarily because you won’t give too big of an offer to people who rarely come in, while actually maintaining value for the customers who come in regularly.
Learn more about our payments-integrated text message marketing solution here.
2. Personal Offers
Payments-related offers are especially effective in the restaurant industry. By letting your customers earn rewards during every visit, you increase the value of your service.
And don’t forget that everybody needs to eat so a little “text message nudge” to say, “Hey, remember me! Here’s a reward,” goes a long way.
But what about personal offers, such as birthday, anniversary or demographic-based offers?
They’re extremely effective at increasing customer loyalty as well because consumers often view these offers as gifts rather than rewards, meaning personal offers pull on the heartstrings of your customers in ways that other types of marketing messages for restaurants can’t.
Personal offers include:
- Birthday offer
- Anniversary offer
- Veteran’s offer
- Senior’s offer
- Kid’s day offer
How to implement personal offers
In order to implement personal offers, you’ll need to collect demographic information from your customers, such as date of birth & whether or not the customer is a veteran or has children (using example offers above).
By doing so, you’ll have some key points of data that you can use to send targeted personal offers to your customers.
Primary benefit: increased customer satisfaction
The great thing about the personal offer is that it shows that you not only appreciate your customers’ wallets, it shows that you also appreciate who they are as individuals. Better yet, you’re even going to reward them for something that makes them unique.
3. Everyday Business Promotions
The last marketing message for restaurants we are going to discuss is the traditional business promotion. These are every day offers we send to get customers back in the door, whether it be for a free appetizer, drink or to promote some upcoming event like Happy Hour or live entertainment.
While these promotions are more generic than an individualized offer, you can still use them strategically.
In our experience, the best way to use business promotions is to level off revenue on your slow days. All you have to do is run a business promotion on your slowest day of the week. But keep in mind that you’ll have to offer sufficient value in order to be successful.
Business promotions include:
- Everyday discount
- BOGO
- Happy hour
- Late night
- Upcoming event
- New menu item
How to implement business promotions
Everyday business promotions don’t necessarily require you to collect advanced data from your customers.
On the contrary, you’ll just need to do a little sales analysis in order to craft the perfect business promotion. Just identify your slowest day of the week by looking at your sales reporting & use your costs to determine the offer you can give without cutting too deep into your bottom line.
Primary benefit: increased value proposition
Whether the goal is to promote an upcoming event or level off your slowest day of the week, think of everyday business promotion as a way to pique your audience’s interest en masse.
What separates these offers from payments-related & personal offers is that the messaging will be more generic & the offer isn’t necessarily ‘earned’. Therefore, it’s primary benefit is to increase value proposition.
To learn more about our payments-integrated text message marketing solution, visit our webpage. For more articles like this one, visit our blog.
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