Today I’m speaking to restaurant owners, but this concept applies to any business with, or considering, an email newsletter.

I see it all the time, independent restaurants and franchises using email lists to keep in touch with their customers and distribute offers.

Let’s look at why you need to consider integrating SMS (aka. texting) into your marketing plan.

First, to sign up for your email newsletter diners probably need to visit your website and fill out a form, right?

Contrast that to an SMS program, your customers sign up instantly and easily from anywhere with their mobile phone. This means you can capture them with a call to action that they don’t need a computer to respond to.

An example is at point of sale. If you were using text marketing you’d simply invite customers to send a text message to the number 555444 and that’s it. They would be signed up instantly.

I bet you’re thinking – ‘but they can use their phone to sign up to our email program’. Well, maybe, but even if they could – it requires more steps and I bet it’s not easy.

Envision it…

• Person X would need to access the Internet from their phone (29% of Canadian mobile phone users access the Internet with their mobile phone, 68% text[1]) .
• They’d need to finger-type a URL, and once they landed on your website, is it mobile-friendly?
• So if they make it to the sign-up page they fill out of a form and voila- ready to receive email alerts.
• BUT, is that even ideal?  68% use their phone to send and receive texts, but only 31% to send and receive email [1].

I’m not discounting email as a whole, but definitely suggesting that if you’re looking at the best way to quickly reach your audience texting rules!

We’ll be looking at this topic even more in upcoming blog posts. Stay tuned!