Paul Ainsworth uses unique SMS campaign to help win Restaurant of the Year.

FALMOUTH, U.K. - Sept. 6, 2013 - PRLog -- The team at Paul Ainsworth’s No.6 Restaurant in Padstow, Cornwall were ecstatic this week after coming away from the Food and Travel Magazine Reader Awards as Restaurant of the Year.

After the excitement of getting nominated back in June in the Best Restaurant Outside London category, they wanted to share the exciting news with all of their customers. After exploring their usual methods of communication, they decided something bespoke and personal was needed as it was such a prestigious award.

Public Relations Director, Harry Wild, tells us how they worked with FireText (http://www.firetext.co.uk) on a unique SMS marketing strategy to help spread the news.

The customers at No.6 have been extremely supportive of both the restaurant and Paul’s journey as a chef so Harry wanted to ensure that the votes they received were on true merit of their food service and experience, not because they created a press and marketing buzz, this is why they chose to reach out to their existing customers only.

Using SMS was completely new to Harry, so she really didn’t know what kind of response to expect. Her main thoughts before sending the message was that they would have a significant proportion of people who would see the message as spam and would ruin the good relationships that have been built up with  customers over the years.

Harry tells us why she shouldn’t have worried about that:

“Only one person asked us to remove them from our database out of 16,643 people. On the other hand, we had thousands of click throughs, dozens of supportive emails and calls, plenty of social media messages and even made lots of bookings as a result of jogging people’s memories that we’re here.”

The message was sent out on a Tuesday lunch time a few weeks before the vote closed and read:

“I’m so excited to share some news with you. Here at No.6 in Padstow we’ve been shortlisted as one of the best restaurants outside London! As a cherished customer, I wanted to politely reach out in this one-off message to see if you would mind voting for us here: goo.gl/9XRFo Thanks! Paul Ainsworth x”

Within seconds the link started receiving clicks; within 24 hours this had reached over 3,000. At the end of the campaign the overall click through rate was 22.4% with a whopping total of 3732 clicks.

The results surpassed Harry’s expectations:

“If anything, our guests seemed to warm to us more since sending the text out. The SMS campaign was even more successful than we could have imagined and the process was no more taxing than sending a message from my own phone.”

At The Savoy Hotel last Monday, the team were not only thrilled to be crowned Best Restaurant Outside London, but also had the added surprise of winning the overall category of Restaurant of the Year!


To find out how to use SMS for your business visit www.firetext.co.uk