SMS is read within minutes by almost everyone who receives it. That makes it the most powerful timing instrument in restaurant marketing and the easiest to destroy. An email list recovers from over-sending; an SMS list does not, because the response to over-sending is a permanent opt-out and re-acquiring consent is expensive.
In the United States, marketing SMS requires prior express written consent under the TCPA, and the penalties are per message. This is not a formality to be handled later.
US carriers require registered 10-digit long codes for application-to-person messaging. Unregistered traffic is filtered or blocked outright, and the operator usually discovers this as a mysterious drop in redemption rather than as an error.
Register the brand and each campaign use case, expect the process to take days rather than minutes, and keep the registered use case honest: traffic that does not match its registered description gets filtered. Multi-location brands should register once at brand level with campaigns per use case, not per store.
SMS has no subject line, no images worth the MMS cost in most cases, and no room for a preamble. Every message needs four things and nothing else: who it is from, what the offer is, when it expires, and one link.
| Element | Rule |
|---|---|
| Identify the sender | First few words. An unidentified text gets reported, not read. |
| One offer | No lists, no alternatives, no "also". |
| Deadline | A specific date or "today". Urgency is the channel's whole advantage. |
| One link | Short, trackable, going to a page that completes the action on a phone in one screen. |
| Opt-out | Required, and it should be plain rather than buried. |
Unlike email, every SMS has a marginal cost. That changes the maths: a broadcast to twenty thousand people is a real expense, and the channel rewards being selective in a way email does not.
Reserve SMS for the three cases where its timing advantage is decisive: expiry reminders for value the customer already holds, same-day occasion triggers, and high-value win-backs. Those three uses will produce most of the channel’s return at a fraction of the volume.
The right SMS programme sends fewer messages every year and makes more money every year.
Opt-out rate per send is the health metric. Under 0.5% is healthy. Between 0.5% and 1% is a warning. Above 1% means the last message was wrong (wrong audience, wrong time, wrong frequency) and continuing at that rate will strip the list bare within a year.
Because opt-outs are permanent, the cost of an over-send is not the send. It is every future message you will never be allowed to deliver to that person.
Two to four for your most engaged customers, one or fewer for everyone else. Restaurant SMS tolerance is lower than retail because the purchase cycle is short and the messages feel more intrusive. Let opt-out rate per send be the referee.
No. A number provided for order and delivery purposes is transactional consent, not marketing consent, and using it for promotion is exactly the scenario TCPA claims are built on. Collect marketing consent separately and explicitly.
SMS for almost everything. It is cheaper and the message is short by nature. MMS is worth the extra cost only when the image genuinely carries the offer, such as a new product launch or a visual menu item, and even then test it against plain SMS before committing.
Well-targeted restaurant SMS commonly produces click rates several times higher than email and order rates in the high single digits to low teens for warm segments. Those numbers collapse quickly with over-sending, which is why cadence discipline matters more here than anywhere else.
Keep reading
What prior express written consent actually requires, what a defensible consent record contains, and the email and SMS rules that carry real penalties.
Campaigns & offersSetting send frequency per segment rather than per calendar, global frequency caps across channels, and the fatigue signals that appear long before unsubscribes do.
Campaigns & offersWhy issuing value forward, redeemable on the next order rather than this one, protects margin today, buys a second occasion, and self-selects the customers worth paying for.
Campaigns & offersWhy restaurant send-time is different from retail: timing against the meal decision rather than against open rates, and per-customer send windows.
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