How to fill a restaurant quickly

FALMOUTH, U.K. - Sept. 6, 2013 - PRLog -- If you run your own restaurant, chances are, you’ve tried all sorts of ways to fill empty tables with happy customers. If someone said you could take reservations for 90% of your 100 seat restaurant in two hours with a simple SMS message you probably wouldn’t believe them. Here Kunwar Sood from Vari tells us how it can be done and exactly why he believes SMS is an integral marketing tool for his business.

If you’re in the hospitality trade you probably work long, unsociable hours and barely have enough time to sit down; let alone come up with new ideas to market yourself. Putting together a marketing campaign may be the last thing on your mind, which is why SMS could be the perfect solution. Not only could it save you time and money but it enables you to communicate with your customers direct to their pockets 24/7.

Vari (http://www.vari.co.uk/) is a popular North Indian restaurant and bar in Newington, Kent with a proactive marketing strategy. Kunwar understands the importance of marketing in order to grow his client base, but running a restaurant keeps him very busy. He says: “I was looking for a platform which would enable me to send a simple message to my customers instantly, SMS was the perfect solution.”

Kunwar wanted to get a simple message out to all of his subscribers in an instant, with the aim of getting a quick response and to increase bookings for that weekend. He put together a simple message containing all relevant information, the offer, price, contact details and a website link to enhance the content.

The message read: “Father’s Day lunch on Sunday, 6 courses £20 per person. Under 10s Half Price. Call to book, 01795 842540 visit www.vari.co.uk Text STOP to 82228”

The message was sent out to 2,505 contacts at 11:20am on the Thursday before Father’s Day.

By 1:30pm, 90 of the 100 seats in his restaurant were reserved.

Kunwar knows the importance of giving customers the chance to opt-out of his marketing which is another reason why he chose SMS; contacts can be unsubscribed with a simple message making it easy for both business and customer to opt-out. The good news is, of the 2505 the message went out to, retention rate was high with just 9 choosing to opt-out of future offers.

You can’t argue with those results – and all for just £100!

This is just one example of the use of SMS to boost sales and enhance customer experience, get in touch with www.firetext.co.uk to find out more.