Restaurants
Mobile Marketing in Action – Restaurants
Restaurants can greatly benefit from Mobile Marketing as they offer a product that is for immediate consumptions and that every one needs. There are a few ways for a restaurant to benefit from Mobile Marketing. One of the most obvious one is to offer targeted discounts in the form of mobile coupons that each restaurant can generate on the fly and when needed.
The first step for a restaurant is to have its customer base sign up to its SMS clients list. The most efficient way to do that is to let every one know that you have a SMS list. Table top tents are a great way to let your customer know, flyers, menus and all printed advertising are also a good place. We recommend having some signage on your door and next to the cash register. Don’t forget to use your existing web site, we can provide you with small SMS opt-in widget that can visible on your web page. You can also hand out discount cards to all of your customers, on those cards the customer can send a text message to a specific number and then opt-in to your SMS list.
The key here is to entice your customer. Why do they need to bother to opt-in? It is here that you must use your knowledge of your client base and offer them something that is worth their trouble without breaking your bank. Maybe a free drink, a free appetizer or a discount. Whatever you choose it must be significant enough.
Now let’s look at a concrete example. “Tony’s Pizza” for example decides to offer a free pitcher of soda with the purchase of a large pizza for dine-in customers. In that case we would set up a keyword for “Tony’s Pizza”, the keyword could be: tonyspizza1, all a customer has to do is compose a new SMS text message to 41513 that just contains tonyspizza1, or if the customer has a QR code reader on his/her phone, then just scan the QR code.
At that point a SMS text message is sent to our server, in a matter of seconds the customer receives a SMS text message back that reads something like this:
“Welcome to Tony’s Pizza discount club. Use coupon code 444444 to get your Free soda pitcher with a large dine-in pizza purchase. Text STOP to opt-out”
When the customer is ready to use the coupon, all he has to do is either show the SMS text message or give you the coupon code. You decide how the coupon code are generated based on your POS system.
Now that the customer has opted in to your SMS list, you can send further SMS text message whenever you want. We recommend not to send more than 1 or 2 SMS messages per month so the customers will not be tempted to opt-out. After a while, you will have several hundreds customers opted-in to your list, let’s say that one day business is slow, you can then send a SMS text message to your entire list with an offer valid that day only. You know that over 97% of the people will read the message within a few minutes, so chances are they will act on it!
There are many other ways to use Mobile Marketing for restaurants, not only to give discounts or free items, but also to send confirmation messages a few hours before a reservation time, to announce new offerings or special events.
