SMS Marketing for Restaurants That Fills Empty Tables
Most restaurants only have the details of the person who booked. Everyone else leaves, and you never reach them again.
Connect98 helps you capture more of your customers while they’re on-site, so you can reach them again when it matters.
Right now, you only capture one customer per table
The person who made the booking. A table of four walks in.
You capture one. You lose three.
Everyone else enjoys the experience, then leaves. You don’t know who they are. You can’t reach them again. That’s lost revenue — every single service.
Connect98 changes that
Capture customer mobile numbers quickly and easily, then use them to:
- Fill quiet early-week tables
- Recover last-minute cancellations
- Bring guests back with targeted offers
- Promote events, theme nights, and new menus
What about walk-ins? Or customers ordering through delivery apps? You don’t know them either.
With Connect98, you can start turning those invisible customers into repeat business.
When you reach customers, they actually see it.
Your customers don’t miss it — they read it.
- Messages are seen within minutes
- No algorithms deciding who sees your content
- Works on every mobile phone
How it works: the customer journey
How it works: the customer journey
Capture customers while they’re still in your venue
Not just the person who booked, everyone at the table.
Connect98 makes it simple for customers to share their details in the moment.
Scan a QR code. Customers enter their number on their own phone in seconds.
Use a branded keypad. Customers enter their number on a device while they’re waiting, ordering, or paying.
No chasing. No forms. Just a growing database of real customers who have already experienced your business.
“We have been customers of Connect98 across the group for several years now and consider them to be a valued business partner. Their service allows us to create a very valuable database of customers mobile numbers.
A short message with a little incentive always generates more business. Text marketing also helped us enormously when we came out of lockdown. It was the quickest and easiest way to let our customers know we were open again.”
Vinay Bhudia, General Manager,
Tiger Bay International
“One of the most useful features of the Connect98 system is that we can send messages out from Head Office to all our customers, or just locally from any location. We also run competitions using different keywords and always get a great response from that.
Because the response to text is almost immediate, we can send out announcements relating to real-time weather conditions, eg ‘Come and bowl when it is too hot, too cold, too wet...’”
Ana Pinto, Head of Marketing,
Namco Funscape (10-pin bowling)
“Vaping manufacturers are continually adding new products and different, updated vaping devices to their range. Rather than waiting for customers to come into any of our shops to see what is new and available, we often send a text message. We can include in this a link to our website where they can explore the entire range.
I would recommend Connect98 to any retailer that wants to encourage repeat business. It is a great way to stay in touch.”
David Carmichael, Owner,
Carmichaels Vaping
“We started using Connect98 a few months before lockdown and thank goodness we did. Coming out of lockdown it seemed like the whole country needed a haircut and every hairdresser was trying to greet them. We got in first, sent a message out as soon as Boris made his announcement and within 24 hours nearly 20% of our database had made appointments. It is all about getting there first. You know what they say, ‘if you snooze – you lose’.”
Lisa Harris, Owner,
Colour By Lisa
“The course was flooded a few years back and we had to let all our members know that it was unplayable. There was no point in sending an email as that may not be read for days. We ended up phoning all our most likely effected members. Following that incident, we decided to look at SMS as a medium for communicating quickly, mainly because of its instant impact and high open-rate.
The Connect98 platform suited all our requirements and even allowed us to capture the numbers of our ‘Pay & Play’ visitors. We now use it on a regular basis to advise of spare Tee times and Clubhouse events. We are very happy with the service they provide.”
Andrew Killing, General Manager,
Thorney Park Golf Club
“Connect98 has been extremely useful to us in keeping all my therapists busy throughout the day. We can determine when our advance bookings have dropped, and send out incentives to fill those slots. We also use the loyalty scheme rather than printing and stamping cards.”
Rumana Merali, Owner,
Rumiz Beauty Studio
“At Santa Pod we have been using texting and Connect98 for a long time. We are able to grow the size of our customer database when we interact with them on event days.
Between races we ask visitors to text us using ‘POD’ to 60163, followed by a record they would like to hear, or a Birthday/Anniversary they would like read out. With Connect98’s real-time monitoring our PA announcer is able to see these requests as they come in. We are also able to capture the mobile number and adding it to our database, we then have more people to market to for future events.”
Caroline Holden, Commercial Manager,
Santa Pod Drag Racing