We are big proponents that email marketing is a sports bar’s best friend. Next to that, SMS marketing is the next best thing for sports-themed restaurants. And for some sports bars, it may be the best marketing avenue to take.

SMS marketing, aka text message marketing, is a type of marketing effort that sends promotions and offers via text message to customers. It boasts a high engagement and ROI for businesses, yet 66% of businesses don’t use SMS marketing at all and no doubt that figure is even higher for the bars and restaurant industry.

Let’s look at some of the benefits of text message marketing for sports bars.

Benefits of Text Message/SMS Marketing for Sports Bars

Like email marketing, SMS marketing has a lot of benefits (and many overlapping ones). It also trumps email in a few areas. Like all marketing campaigns, a robust delivery and messaging strategy can yield the best ROI for your sports bar.

Immediate Delivery to Guests and Fans

One of the best parts of text message marketing for sports bars is immediate and reliable delivery. There’s no real SPAM filters for text (which is a mix bag for consumers). More importantly is that once you send your message it hits the phones of everyone on your list. This means you can quickly and easily create last minute offers to entice folks to come visit your location.

For sports bars, this can be everything from discounts, specialist, or even telling them what game is on your TVs that evening.

Increased Reach & Engagement

Like email, you own your SMS marketing list and, also like email, it’s hard for folks to ignore your message. In fact, it’s even more difficult to ignore a text alert than an email. Text marketing has an open rate of 98% compared to email (17%). And SMS is estimated to have an open rate of 95% within three minutes of receipt compared to email (25%), further making text marketing a great last-minute offer solution.

This is a huge advantage over social media marketing where platforms want to charge you a lot extra to reach the audience you’ve cultivated. You also don’t need to be as creative with subject lines or email design. Just create guests an offer they can’t refuse and hit send.

Higher engagement also means higher retention, and when it’s cheaper to retain a guest than find a new one, SMS seems like a huge win-win for sports bars.

Cost Effective & Higher ROI

Text message marketing for sports bars is also more cost effective and has a minimal investment, especially when compared to more traditional marketing venues (TV, radio, print, etc.). It’s also much cheaper than social media marketing. It costs an average of $0.01 per SMS recipient compared to $0.99 per click on social (not to mention other upfront impression costs).

Because of that, and because you’re delivering straight to the consumer, ROI is often higher, too.

According to a Business.com article, conversion rates for SMS marketing is very high  (45%) compared to email (8%). The key is increased reach, higher open rates, and short/digestible messaging.

Better Personalization

With traditional marketing, you have to cast a very wide and generic net with your messaging. With SMS marketing, you can personalize the message and offers, thanks to automation and customer data.

You’re able to refer to the customer by name and offer them a discount on their favorite menu items, making the offer more relevant to the guest, with them a happy birthday, or let them know their favorite team is playing. You can also use small images, animated GIFs, and emojis that’ll help show your business as having a human personality and not just a corporate husk.

This all also helps build customer loyalty to your brand.

Versatile Marketing Use

Text message marketing can be used in a variety of ways for sports bars and restaurants. Some examples:

• Alerting guests of upcoming special events
• Remind folks about table reservations
• Reminding folks who started a delivery order that they hadn’t actually hit “submit”
• Letting folks know what games you plan on showing on your TVs
• Menu specials
• Discount offers
• “Happy Birthday!” messages

That’s just scratching the surface of the benefits of SMS marketing for sports bars!

Don’t Forget to Follow SMS Marketing Regulations

However, you can’t just send text messages to folks willy-nilly without care. There are two major regulations in the US you’ll have to consider when delving into SMS marketing — TCPA and CAN-SPAM.

TCPA covers a lot of common sense stuff, such as requiring folks to explicitly opt-in to your SMS marketing. This can be as simple as info capture forms on your website, or cards guests can fill out as they pay their bill. CAN-SPAM is similar but looks to protect consumers from unwanted automated robotexts and phishing scams.

The upside to these regulations is that everyone on your text-marketing list have opted-in, meaning they want to receive marketing updates from your sports bar. This shows that the guest is already invested in your brand and will be more receptive to various other offers and updates.

Sports bar operators should familiarize themselves with those regulations when starting an SMS marketing program. They’re simple enough and shouldn’t be a huge obstacle for an operation looking to reap the benefits of SMS marketing.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, there’s a lot of upside for SMS marketing. Despite that, two-thirds of marketers (66%) don’t use text messaging as part of their marketing campaigns. Stay tuned as we publish more text message marketing ideas for sports bars in the near future.