Quick-service chains move visits with mobile marketing

The Famous Dave’s and Granite City Food & Brewery quick-service restaurant banners are bringing in customers and dollars via text messaging.

BBQ Holdings, parent company of Famous Dave’s and Granite City Food & Brewery, is supporting its mobile engagement strategy with technology from unified mobile messaging solution provider Mobivity. For the past two years, select Famous Dave’s stores utilized Mobivity’s Unified Messaging platform to perform personalized text message marketing.

Famous Dave’s showed an attributable lift of 26% in customer frequency with text messaging (compared to non-messaging customers) and nearly a 50X return on marketing spend. During the first quarter of 2021, the retailer grew its messaging subscriber base17.5%, which it attributes to text messaging successfully supporting COVID-19-related spikes in restaurant delivery and takeout business, as well as dining room reopenings.

Based on these results, BBQ Holdings is now rolling out the Mobivity Unified Messaging platform across all its Famous Dave’s and Granite City Food & Brewery locations as part of a two-year partnership.

“Mobivity used its unique experience in building successful text marketing programs for restaurants to help make text messaging our top digital engagement channel that continues to drive meaningful increases in guest frequency and spend,” said Al Hank, COO at BBQ Holdings. “Text messaging is a critical channel which we own and control, thanks to Mobivity. It not only enabled us to improve customer engagement, but was instrumental in helping us navigate various business interruptions and challenges during the pandemic. Messaging has also elevated our customer experience and strengthened customer loyalty, enabling us to grow our customer base across the board.”
 
As of January 3, 2021, BBQ Holdings had four brands with 145 brick-and-mortar locations in 31 states and three countries, including 47 company-owned and 98 franchise-operated restaurants.