[Case Study] How One Family-Owned Restaurant Promoted a Limited Time Tamale Offer with ManyChat SMS

To create maximum impact in the short time before Christmas, a family-owned Mexican restaurant teamed up with Mackensie Liberman to market a holiday tamale promotion. The eatery created an offer of $23.95 per dozen tamales for an eight-day period that allowed customers to choose what type of tamale and when they’d want to pick up the order. 

The campaign was targeted at the restaurant’s current subscriber list in the Spokane area. To ensure that people saw the offer, Mackensie did not use paid Facebook messages because of bids and approvals. Instead, she used a mix of SMS and Messenger to reach maximum visibility. 

Promoting a limited time offer with SMS and Messenger

Each channel had its own message with a call to action to place an order in Messenger and take advantage of this limited-time offer. 

The text message sent read:

Through December 4th, we’re offering a dozen of our delicious tamales for take-out for only $23.95. Just in time for the holidays. Pork or vegetarian. Hot or cold. It’s up to you! If you want to order a dozen or two, just click this link. 

The non-promotional Messenger sequence message read:

Do you love tamales?

When someone clicked through the SMS message, they were sent to Messenger to put in their order details. 

People who were interested in the offer were asked if they wanted to order a dozen. Those who responded “no” were asked what their favorite Mexican dish was, and were told to come down and enjoy it at the restaurant before the end of the year. 

People who wanted to place an order of tamales were asked a few questions using a mix of multiple-choice user input and free keyword input. This helped the restaurant stay organized when taking orders through Messenger. They asked the following questions:

1. How many dozens of tamales do you want?
2. Do you want pork or vegetarian?
3. Do you want the tamales hot or cold?
4. What is the name of the person picking up the order, and what is their phone number?
5. What is a good pick-up date and time, before December 25th, to come in and pay for the order?

After a customer put in their details, the restaurant sent an order summary of all the user input answers. The customers were then prompted to either confirm or modify their order.

When a user confirmed their order, the customer would be tagged, and a zap sent the information to Google Sheets, plus, a text to the restaurant owner notifying him of the new order.

If someone had to modify the order, they were asked which part of the order they wanted to modify. It also added a tag, so when the changes were made, users would get sent straight to the summary to confirm, instead of going through the entire ordering process again. 

Sending reminders to encourage action

One thing Mackensie did to get people to complete their order was to leverage automated follow-ups. She set up rules for reminder messages after each question. So, if a user dropped off after two questions, the Messenger chatbot sent a message 10 minutes later asking if they still wanted tamales. If they responded with yes, they were taken back to where they left off.

Mackensie also set up two different messages that reminded people of their tamale order. One a day before pick-up, and another an hour before pick-up confirming they’d be there at the date and time to get their order. They included directions to the restaurant with a link. When a user clicked it, directions would pop up in Google Maps from their current location.

The campaign’s success

The restaurants’ eight-day campaign for the holidays was so successful that they ran out of tamales. It was sent to 3547 subscribers (364 of those to SMS subscribers). Out of that, 819 said in Messenger that they love tamales and 29 of those started the order process (10 additional from SMS), with 23 people ordering a total of 27 dozen.  

The campaign was originally not going to happen this year due to the owner being busy with opening his second location. But at the last minute, he shifted gears and decided to go with the campaign. He was so overwhelmed by the response, he decided to send a free appetizer coupon to everyone interested in ordering beyond the 23 people who ordered.

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