5 Reasons Why Chatbots can Boost your restaurant business

In April 2016, at Facebook’s Developer Conference, Mark Zuckerburg announced the Facebook Messenger Platform, a storefront inside Messenger for businesses and apps to chat directly with people. He said, ” We think that you should just be able to message a business in the same way that you message a friend.”. In the last few years since then, the messenger marketing has evolved rapidly and is changing the way people connect with companies and businesses.  It is the fastest growing channel for businesses to find and interact with their target audience. Just to give you a perspective here are some key facts:

• 20 billion messages are sent between people and businesses every month
• There are 300,000 active Messenger bots on the platform
• Messenger is the second most popular iOS app of all time – behind only the main Facebook app

Check out this infographic to get an idea.

So you are sure to find your tribe from these 1.3 billion people hanging out on the Facebook Messaging Platform. If we look at the number of businesses using Chatbots at 300,000, it is still very nascent.  This is the right time for early adopters to move in and reap the early mover’s advantage of this platform.

In this post, I want to specifically focus on how restaurant owners can leverage this technology to differentiate themselves from their competitors and proactively use Facebook Messenger and 10x their ROI by generating more leads and conversions.

1. Lead Generation:

   Getting new customers for your restaurant can be a daunting task in this hyper-competitive market. Ad spends can be steep and the results may not be sufficient to justify the money spent. Facebook Messenger offers a low-cost opportunity to run Click to Messenger Ad campaigns and immediately engage with your subscribers in a personalized and intimate fashion.  You could even keep them coming into your restaurant during the ‘non-peak’ underutilized time zones by offering special discount vouchers and keep track of the entire data.

2. Share Your Menu:

   Customer experience is crucial to hook your customers. As a restaurant owner, you can easily share the star attractions on your menu in an easy to navigate format via image cards right from the comfort of the mobile screen. No need for a user to go on a website to browse through your menu.

   

3. Easy Reservations: 

   One of the biggest advantages of using Facebook Messenger Chatbot for a restaurant is to allow customers to make bookings or reserve tables easily from their mobiles. Not only is the customer saved from the hassle of making a physical call to book a table and find availability. It saves you the restaurant owner the additional cost of having a person deployed to attend to customer calls and manually take bookings requests. It also frees up their time to attend to other matters. And you never have to lose an opportunity to convert because of the non-availability of the staff to attend to the phone, when the customer dialed in.  Your bot can easily do this for you, 24×7 and integrate well with your internal booking or CRM system.

   

   

4. Loyalty Rewards and Incentives:

   Facebook Messenger Chatbot campaigns offer a great way to reward your customers for coming back to dine with you, by offering them a freebie like a dessert or Buy one Get one deal.  You can even automate your loyalty program for encouraging further referrals. Example, you reward the customer for sharing a discount coupon with their friends or contacts.  All easy to track and deploy using Messenger Chatbots.

5. Personalization via segmentation:

   As you build your subscriber base and start collecting data about the interactions that your customers have with your chatbot, you can start tagging them based on their choices, selections and start to send personalized offers and deals based on specific segments. For example, if a group of users liked a specific item on your menu, you can offer a discount deal based on their preferred item to draw them into your restaurant again.

These are just some examples. Let me share with you a case study of how a restaurant owner achieved 300%+ ROAS via using ManyChat chatbot. The specific pain points that Joe’s Burgers (name changed for confidentiality reasons) was facing were:

1. Discovery of the restaurant was heavily dependent on word of mouth and friend’s recommendations.
2. It was hard to track who redeemed their brand awareness campaigns or offers.
3. The competition was intense and they needed to find a way to set them apart and differentiate
4. They had tried email marketing and Facebook Advertising but did not get the desired engagement rates or conversion rates
5. They did not have the budget for complex software systems to manage and automate bookings. Needed something inexpensive and easy to use.

All these were easily addressed by one simple solution – setting up a chatbot using ManyChat platform.  The results were tangible, immediate and impactful. In this case, their ROAS jumped by 300%+. Their subscriber base grew from 0 to 500+ within a short span. Their offer redemptions were to the tune of 1000+ and their sales were on track to for their target for $4 Million by the end of 2019.

So now, what are you waiting for? Reach out to us and help us to translate this success for your restaurant business.

Here is a glimpse of a demo restaurant bot for you to get the taste of this new technology.

AGRestaurantBotDemo

This bot is built using ManyChat Platform. There are others to choose from such as Mobile Monkey. You can check out their Restaurant Bot Demo here.

Which tool you use depends on the price and economies. What’s far more important is what you do with that tool? What strategies and campaigns you design using the tool or platform to attract your target audience, engage with them, nurture them and finally get them to not only convert but become your advocates.

We would be happy to help.

Anjuli Gopalakrishna is a messenger marketing expert and has Agency Partner status with ManyChat. She can help you to set up Facebook Messenger Chatbot for your business.