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There's a saying in the restaurant business in Malaysia, owners need to work 365 days a year even through holidays and notable breaks like Chinese New Year, Hari Raya, and Deepavali. This can be draining because these are times when children look forward to spending time with parents, and a time for when parents have the time to spend with family.
It's a concern for owners to close the restaurant, even during off-peak hours. As they say every hour the restaurant doesn't operate the restaurant looses the opportunity to make earnings from a hungry customer.
So we went out to find an example on the Internet to see how some restaurant owners tackled this issue. Low and behold we found an interesting take to this issue, where a famous chain restaurant in the US took advantage of the downtime by approaching it with a proactive response to customers interested in their service by encouraging them to return during the down-time.
Did you notice that Chipotle’s across the country were closed on Monday for lunch? What does this have to do with SMS marketing you ask? Instead of Chipotle just closing their doors, turning away loyal customers, they decided to use an SMS autoresponder to offer a free burrito, burrito bowl, salad, or order of tacos, to those customers that were inconvenienced.
How did it all work? First, when a Chipotle customer approached one of the locations that were closed, they were greeted with the following sign on the door. The sign read “We’re closed for lunch today to attend a meeting with all the other Chipotle employees. But don’t worry, we’ll be back open at 3pm. If we messed up your lunch plans, let us make it up to you: visit chiptole.com/raincheck. See you soon.” You can see a photo of the Chipotle sign below.
FYI – Every Chipotle restaurant in the country closed for lunch on February 8, 2016, so that employees could meet and discuss food safety strategy, following several reports of E. coli linked to the popular burrito chain.
When customers visited chipotle.com/raincheck on their mobile phones, they were told to text “RAINCHECK” to Chipotle’s SMS short code 888-222, in order for Chipotle to hook them up for messing up their lunch plans. You can see this below in the mobile phone screenshot.
If for some reason you didn’t open up chipotle.com/raincheck on your mobile phone, you still could access the website on your desktop computer. A screenshot of the Chipotle website from a desktop computer is below.
The next step was for customers to text message “RAINCHECK” to Chipotle’s SMS short code, which is 888-222. After texting “RAINCHECK” to 888-222, customers received a text message autoresponder message, with a link to a free burrito. You can see the text message below.
Do you have a restaurant, and are you interested in SMS marketing? Learn more about how SMS marketing can help your restaurant here.
