As marketing becomes increasingly digital and personalized, restaurants are rethinking how they connect with guests.
Collecting and using emails, phone numbers, or both can transform your restaurant communication strategy and strengthen both your restaurant customer loyalty program and broader restaurant customer relationship management efforts.
Let’s unpack the pros, cons, and compliance considerations.
Email remains one of the most cost-effective ways for restaurants to reach customers. Email outreach is the cheapest and most direct form of digital marketing. Done correctly, email marketing can provide the highest ROI (return on investment) of direct outreach.
Email works especially well for:
Together, these strengths make email a natural fit for supporting a polished, consistent restaurant communication strategy.
For full-service restaurants or brands that lean heavily on ambiance and concept, email is a natural fit. It encourages deeper engagement over time and helps build loyalty in a relationship-driven way.
Email also provides a stable, owned channel for nurturing long-term loyalty, making it a powerful complement to any polished restaurant communication strategy or restaurant customer loyalty program.
When it comes to email, it’s important to have realistic expectations. Don’t expect a large rate of engagement. Email open rates are usually between 17 and 28 percent, with click-through rates of about 2–5 percent.
To make the most of email marketing despite these numbers, you should:
By following these practices, email can be highly effective for restaurants. But it’s important to remember that it’s not an instant-response channel. For that, you need SMS.
SMS stands for Short Message Service – you probably call it texting. It’s a fast, highly engaging way to reach customers directly to share promotions, daily specials, or order updates.
While email allows for detailed storytelling, SMS connects with guests immediately.
SMS boasts a 98 percent open rate and a 20–36 percent click-through rate, making it arguably the most direct customer communication method available.
SMS is ideal for:
This level of immediacy directly supports strong restaurant customer relationship management, especially for restaurants with high volume or heavy delivery demand (including third-party delivery).
SMS is effective because the customer sees the message right after you send it, and usually takes action just as fast.
This immediate visibility and high engagement make SMS particularly valuable for quick-service and fast-casual restaurants, where speed, convenience, and quick customer decisions — like ordering takeout or checking daily specials — are central to the guest experience.
You don’t want to bug your guests. Irritating your customer is one down side to SMS, because messages almost always cause a notification of some kind that will interrupt the customer’s day.
And the legal requirements for SMS are stricter than they are for email. In the United States, you must:
Regulations in Canada are even stricter.
As you can see, SMS is more heavily regulated than email, and overuse or mismanagement can quickly annoy guests or even lead to compliance issues. Depending on your region, there may be anti-spam laws to prevent mass marketing to personal devices. Consequences can include fines and lawsuits.
Done right, however, it can be a highly effective, high-engagement channel.
Understanding the strengths and limitations of each channel is one thing, but knowing which channel fits your restaurant type is key to driving real engagement and results.
I see clear patterns in how different restaurant types benefit from email versus SMS:
There’s no universal “better” channel. Success depends on your restaurant concept, guest expectations, and the type of interaction you want to foster. The key is matching the right channel to the right context.
Communication is all about being strategic and delivering a consistent message across all of your outlets. Overcommunication leads to unsubscribes and mistrust, no matter the channel.
I recommend leveraging AI-driven marketing platforms like Dyne to automate segmentation, timing, and frequency, especially as part of a larger restaurant customer loyalty program.
AI helps restaurants deliver relevant content without overwhelming guests, while ensuring that every message supports good restaurant customer relationship management.
Generally, these are the three main best practices:
It’s no longer about blasting a billboard-like message to as many people as possible. It’s more effective to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
To achieve this, restaurants need to group their guests based on behaviors and preferences, a process called segmentation. That could look like identifying weekend regulars or guests who always order delivery, for instance. Pairing segmentation with guest data analytics helps you send more relevant and effective messages.
You can do this manually, but it's time-consuming. That’s where using a tool or working with a partner helps. Como and Froogal offer platforms that enable this kind of personalization.
Both email and SMS can be incredibly powerful when used strategically.
Whether you focus on brand-building through email, high-engagement SMS promotions, or a balanced approach, the key is integrating both channels into your restaurant communication strategy.
The most successful restaurants use every tool strategically — email for storytelling, SMS for immediacy — so every message works together, not against each other.
Doing this strengthens your restaurant customer loyalty program and lets you leverage smart restaurant customer relationship management practices.
If you’re ready to elevate your restaurant communication strategy, I can help. Schedule a consultation with me today to get personalized insights on collecting guest information responsibly, engaging customers without overwhelming them, and turning every message into a meaningful connection.