I’m Derek Johnson with tatango.com.
I’m answering the question, “How are restaurants using text message marketing?”
So, for any restaurant, at least the ones I’ve talked to, when it comes to marketing,
the goal is to get the customers into the restaurant to purchase things, and that’s
no different with the reason why restaurants use text message marketing.
It’s essentially to get customers to come into the store and purchase things.
But how do you do that?
Well, the first thing you have to realize is, in the United States, we have the Telephone
Consumer Protection Act, TCPA.
It’s a federal law, and it essentially says that a restaurant, or really any business,
has to first get the permission of their customers to send them text message offers.
So, how do you as a restaurant get your customer’s permission?
Well, it’s pretty easy.
Customers can take out their phone, and they can simply text an SMS keyword to a short
code to opt in.
So, a keyword is something like, “Join,” it can be any word or phrase, and then the
short code can be any number five or six digits long, and you as a restaurant get to select
that phone number.
So, a customer texts the word “Join,” for example, to 12345 to opt in, and essentially
they’re opting in and giving your brand the permission to send them text message offers.
So, how do you grow your list fast?
Well, the way that we found here at Tatango, we’ve been doing this for 10-plus years,
the way that restaurants can grow their lists the fastest is to offer some sort of incentive
to opt in.
So, what does that look like?
So, without an incentive, it would be, “Join our mobile club.
Text “Join” to 12345 to receive offers, and specials, and discounts,” and things
like that, no incentive.
An incentivized opt-in would look something like, “Save 20% off your purchase today
when you join our mobile club.
Text “Join” to 12345.”
In a study that we found, a consumer is 520% more likely to give up their data, like a
mobile phone number, if there’s some sort of incentive from the business to give that
data.
Now, text messaging has a 99% open rate, which means essentially all the text messages you
send your customers, they’re going to see.
So, you can see how valuable a mobile phone number is.
So, for that mobile phone number, a restaurant is most likely gonna have to give up some
type of value to the customer, because the customer is giving you something very, very
valuable, which is their phone number.
So, the goal of text message marketing is to get customers into the store.
But really on the back end of that, and what drives that, and what drives the amount of
customers coming into the restaurant is to build a large subscriber database of phone
numbers.
So, you do that by offering an incentive, customers opt in, and then, as the list grows,
you continue to send text message offers or promotions to those customers to that list.
So, as the list grows, you’re sending more text messages, and with 99% open rates, everybody
is seeing those text messages.
And let’s say you have a certain percentage of customers that convert from that text message
to come in.
That means the more subscribers you have, the more customers will come into the store.
So, most of the time that restaurants are sending pretty simple text message offers,
you know, to their customers, “Twenty percent off.
Buy one get one free,” type offers, now there’s two different kinds of mobile messages.
There’s text messages, and then there’s MMS messages.
A text message is a plain 160 characters.
You can put a link in, you can put a phone number that you can call into the text message,
and they can click it.
And then you have MMS messages.
MMS messages allow 500 characters instead of 160, and they allow a subject line, and
they allow some type of media content into the message.
So, that can be a video, an image, or even a GIF, those are pretty popular nowadays.
So, really, depending on kind of what you’re advertising, what you’re promoting, you’re
gonna select, as a restaurant, between sending a text message or an MMS message to your customers.
And essentially at the end of the day, whatever it is, it’s to encourage those people that
have signed up for your text messages to come into the restaurant to purchase something.
So, that’s how we’re seeing restaurants use text message marketing nowadays.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact Tatango.
We have many restaurant clients.
We’ve been doing this for 10-plus years.
We can definitely help your restaurant figure out how to use text message marketing to drive
in restaurant purchases for your restaurant.