A recent report by eMarketer reports that mobile users are increasingly using their smartphones to search for local restaurant information. In fact, mobile users have increased their searching for local restaurants, based on the mobile user’s location, by up to 40%. This growing demand for local information is a tremendous opportunity for the restaurant industry to utilize the latest in mobile marketing technology to turn this demand for information into sales revenue.
Text Messages Get Opened and Read
An undisputed fact of the typical mobile phone user’s behavior is their response to text messaging. Mobile users open and actually read text messages at a significantly higher ratio than email messages and even voice messages. Bottom line is that even marketing messaging delivered by text are opened and read by recipients. Combine this fact with the growing demand for local restaurant information and you have a recipe for marketing success.
Restaurants can easily execute this recipe for success by building a database of customers and prospective customers’ mobile phone numbers. This can be done by offering the restaurant’s website visitors with a discount coupon to become a member of its mobile loyalty club and provide their specific dining preferences to ensure they only receive information of interest to them. Promotional signage can be placed at checkout or as a menu insert but the most important factor is to immediately reward the new member for joining.
For instance, if they are typically a lunch customer, then customers can receive automated but personalized text messages of that day’s lunch specials as well as notifications of special events, birthday greetings, and reminders for Valentine’s Day and so on.
With some basic training, restaurant servers can be the front line of promoting the restaurant’s mobile loyalty club as easily as they tell every customer that day’s lunch and dinner specials. It can be made to be fun and an instant benefit for the customer by simply having the customer text to join the loyalty club on the spot and receive a free desert or similar reward for immediately signing up.
Use the Latest Mobile Marketing Technology
The latest mobile marketing technology also allows restaurants to deliver promotional coupons by text message, track the response rates and measure the ROI for each promotion. All of these functions can also be fully automated and detailed reports delivered to management by email on a daily basis.
Additional promotional opportunities to build your restaurant’s loyalty club and database of mobile phone numbers are many. From your restaurant’s Facebook page, print, radio and television advertising to billboards, you need to promote your restaurant’s mobile loyalty club in every medium possible.
By making your customers feel special, by providing them with the information they want, when they want it and in the medium they want to receive it, you are building a long term relationship with your customers. Your mobile database will soon become one of your most important marketing assets. And the best news of all is that in short order your mobile marketing initiatives will become your least expensive, highest ROI marketing medium.
