How to import e-mails and phone numbers | Send e-mail and SMS invitations | SMS cost
We know that many restaurants have a list of existing food clients who may have ordered offline or over the phone, prior to the restaurant implementing an online ordering system. The existing clients gave their phone numbers or e-mails to the restaurant especially to get notified about new ways of ordering, menu changes, special deals, closed for holidays, etc.
However, not all restaurants have someone to carefully manage ongoing communication with such people, using a professional messaging system like Twilio, MailChimp, SendGrid, etc. So in many restaurants, this list of clients is rarely or never used, even when it is needed the most.
With the help of our system, restaurants are able to use their existing client database for promotion purposes by importing contacts (e-mails and phone numbers) and inviting them to order online.
The import feature resides in the Kick-starter section -> Invite clients to order online -> Your invitations:
You can choose between sending e-mail or SMS invitations, like this:
Once a type of invitation is finished, however, you can always go back and choose to send the alternative type of invitation as well.
After the type of invitation is chosen, you will be able to:
- edit the fields of the invitation such as Subject line, Body text, and Button text - for the e-mail invitation. The field Promotion either takes automatically the promotion that is available in your account or you may choose from the dropdown another option;
- edit the body text of the invitation - for the SMS invitation. The field Promotion either takes automatically the promotion that is available in your account or you may choose from the dropdown another option.
E-mail invitation edit:
SMS invitation edit:
Once you edit the invitation, you will be able to import contacts - either e-mail addresses or phone numbers, like this:
You may either import a CSV file, or copy-paste contacts in the system (in a certain comma-separated format that we explain).
In the case of e-mail invitations you may choose to send them on the spot or schedule them for later, like this:
Please note that sending e-mails is free of charge from our side, however, sending SMSs has a variable cost.
Before sending the invitations, the system will check the contacts so as not to import invalid contacts, or those of food clients that have already ordered, etc.
However, before uploading the list of clients, make sure that:
- those people are really existing clients of the restaurant that have ordered before, offline, online, or via phone
- those people are really ok to receive unsolicited messages from the restaurant notifying them about the new way of ordering online (e.g. make sure that all the people that have requested in the past to be unsubscribed or removed from the list, are not in the list anymore).
Afterward, some statistics will be available in Your invitation section (restaurant admin panel). Here you will be able to:
- track the results of the invitations sent (no of invitations sent, no of orders, sales value, unsubscribed contacts)
- resume/delete a draft invitation
- create new invitations
Please note that SMS capability may not be available in some countries. If you do not see SMS sending features please check with us again.
You will see the amount SMS invitations in the "Pending payments" section (Partner dashboard -> Restaurants -> Pending payments):
What’s the cost for SMS invitations
We provide an affordable service for uploading client lists. This can be used by accessing the Kickstarter section from the admin panel and clicking on the "Invite clients to order online”, like this:
You may choose between e-mail and SMS invitations or you can implement both. Please note that sending e-mails is free of charge from our side, however, sending SMSs has a variable cost.
In the case of SMSs, after you have succeeded in importing a list of phone numbers, you have the opportunity to see a price quote for the SMS sending job like this:
If you decide to send the SMS notification then click Pay Now to get to the billing section and pay the price quote of the notification campaign.
If you are not yet committed to paying and sending the SMS invitations, then you may resume setting it later, like this:
The cost of SMS invitations depends on the country to which the invites are sent, plus a 2USD handling fee for every payment. This is why, if you test with one or two phone numbers the notification campaign cost looks much bigger than when you do a real import of hundreds of phone numbers. Even if you load hundreds of phone numbers, if you try to extract a "per message" price and compare it with "per SMS" standard industry pricing, you may discover that our price may look double than the typical "per SMS" quotations that you may encounter by a simple search shop-around effort - e.g https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/us.
That's because each message is quite long and is actually formed from 2x160 characters SMSs, like this:
