Old customers are a goldmine [For Restaurant Owners]

Seeing a lot of posts on slow season, so thought to drop some advice that’s working well for me.

Old diners are your cheapest wins. Most restaurants, especially ones with a solid reservation/POS system like Toast/Square, etc. are sitting on a ton of dead contacts. Give them incentive to come back and they will flock, trust me. I’ve had people coming back months and years later. Moreover this builds loyalty and brand identity. Why shouldn’t you go for it?

tldr solution: get old contacts → create specific promo codes only for old customers → use an auto-SMS campaign service → upload contacts CSV → run → auto-book on response or wait for dine-in showups.

Your Source:

1. Pull past guests or visitors from reservations systems like Toast or any customer database you may have. Scraping is illegal, old customers info is not, at least in US and CA. There are no SMS compliance issues since you’re contacting people who have consented to do business with you prior.
2. Score them based on either long-term (6+ months) or short-term (1-6 months) through Google sheets (or even ask ChatGPT to do it for you).
3. Find a solid SMS service to send out your messages. I’ve used Twilio so far, you purchase a designated number to be the source of the texts and add your contacts CSV list. It’s very simple to set up, there’s tons of Youtube tutorials out there that explain this.

Make sure you remove any and all numbers that are far from your area code, we ran into extreme costs per message because of some out of country numbers (we’re in CA and have had many US diners esp in the summer). Twilio otherwise costs $0.0083 per text which is quite reasonable.

1. Create a specific promo code for the recipients, ex. CAFE10 or whatever with instructions on how to redeem it (I just added it as show on dine-in) and write a simple, short message to them. This was mine:

We miss you at [name of my restaurant I’m not adding here]🥢 It's been a while since your last visit. Come back and enjoy 10% OFF your next meal - our authentic flavors are waiting for you! Valid until 9/15/2025. Show this text to redeem. Reply STOP to opt out.

1. And schedule them to run.

We’ve been seeing a stable inflow of diners showing us the promo SMS throughout the 2 months we’ve tested this out, most of them with big families so high tickets. It isn’t crazy big but more than enough to justify the spend on it. We get at least one dine-in order per week with a big order, and that definitely counts as the slow season rolls in. Hope this helps!

Anyone who has run SMS or email campaigns before, would love to hear your thoughts and experience as well.