SMS marketing for restaurants: what is allowed, what works and what to skip

What SMS marketing is, and why it suits a restaurant

SMS marketing means texting your guests from the restaurant: a short message to their mobile number with a reason to order or drop in, such as a new dish, a deal for a quiet day or a table that is still free. Guests need no app and no account.

That suits decisions made in the moment. An email can sit unread for hours, while a text arrives just as your guest wonders what to eat tonight. The flip side is that a text feels personal. A message that misses the mark stands out at once, and unsubscribing takes a single tap. So SMS marketing rests on three things: consent, a reason to write and restraint.

It does not replace your email marketing. Email carries the story and the photos. A text carries the moment.

Service message or promotion

A text that confirms an order is a service message about something the guest did themselves, and it is not advertising. Add an offer and it becomes advertising.

Many guides on this subject are American and assume American law. In the Netherlands, Dutch rules apply.

The rules in the Netherlands: consent comes first

The rules sit in article 11.7 of the Telecommunicatiewet, the Dutch Telecommunications Act, and the ACM, the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets, supervises them. The core rule is simple: promote only to people who agreed beforehand. It applies to email, WhatsApp and other electronic messages, and an SMS is one of those.

The ACM treats consent as valid when:

• the guest made a deliberate choice: a pre-ticked box, pressure or a line buried in your terms and conditions does not count
• the choice was plainly about advertising or offers
• you can prove the consent, up to five years after sending

The exception for guests who already ordered

A guest who has bought from you can, under conditions, receive messages about your own similar products or services without separate consent, a new pizza from a pizzeria for example. The conditions are strict: you obtained the number during the sale, the guest was given a clear, free way to refuse advertising both then and in every message, and you must be able to show it. Treat it as a fallback: one tick box at checkout costs nothing, while arguing later costs time.

In every message: who you are and how to unsubscribe

Each promotional text shows who is sending it. Use your restaurant’s name, never an invented one, the ACM says. It must also offer an opt-out that is quick and free, with no questionnaire and no payment. Act on an unsubscribe at once: under the GDPR (the AVG in Dutch) the data of someone who objects can no longer be used for direct marketing. When a provider does the sending, you are the one who gave the instruction, so the rules apply to you as well.

What the GDPR adds

A phone number is personal data. Say in your privacy statement what you use numbers for and how long you keep them, sign a data processing agreement with your provider, and make unsubscribing as easy as signing up. The ACM polices the sending of advertising, while the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, the Dutch Data Protection Authority, polices how data is handled. The ACM has fined companies hundreds of thousands of euros for unsolicited messages in the past, and any recipient can file a complaint.

This is not legal advice. The rules get tightened from time to time, as with promotional calling on 1 July 2026. If you are unsure, ask a lawyer or read the ACM’s page on spam.

Building a list you are allowed to use

Two hundred guests who said yes are worth more than a thousand numbers from who knows where. Never buy a list. Ask wherever a guest is already with you:

• At checkout on your own ordering site, with a box that is not ticked in advance
• When booking a table, in the same form
• At the table, with a QR code on the menu or the bill
• At the counter, where your team asks and the guest types in their own number
• On your website and Instagram, with a short explanation of what you send
• In the bag with a platform order, on a card giving a reason to order direct

That card is how a platform guest becomes a guest of your own: consent given to the platform is not consent given to you. The article on why guests order through platforms explains how it works.

Reward the sign-up, but never make it a condition. A dessert with the first order is a reward. A guest who cannot order without ticking the box has been pressured, and then the consent is worthless.

Say what they get, and confirm it

Next to the box, say what you send and how often, for instance: “Yes, send me the occasional text with offers from Your Restaurant, two a month at most. I can unsubscribe at any time.” Then send a welcome text straight away with your name, an unsubscribe option and a link for the guest to confirm. Without that confirmation, a typing error gives a stranger a message from you every month, and it is harder to show that the number belongs to the guest.

Record what you need to prove

For every guest, keep the number, the date and time, where they ticked the box, the wording of the box at that moment and any unsubscribe. In a restaurant CRM this sits on the guest’s own record. Never wipe an unsubscribe without leaving a trace. Keep the number on a suppression list, or you will add it again by accident the next time they order.

What you send with

Look for a provider that offers a data processing agreement, your own sender name, an unsubscribe that works automatically, a price per message part you know in advance, scheduling by time slot and a link to your orders, so you can select guests by what they ordered. How Portano approaches email and SMS is described on the email and SMS page.

The message itself: characters, sender and link

The famous 160 is a ceiling that only holds while every character belongs to the standard SMS character set. Ordinary letters, digits, most punctuation and letters such as é, è, ü and ö are in it. The euro sign fits as well but counts for two. Include a single character from outside the set and the whole message switches to Unicode, which holds just 70. Dutch trips over this more often than you would expect.

Longer messages are split into parts of 153 characters, or 67 in Unicode, because each part gives up room to a sequence number. Many providers bill per part. Take the Dutch message “[Restaurant]: nieuwe ideeën op de kaart. Bestel op jouwzaak.nl/bestel Afmelden: jouwzaak.nl/stop”. It is 96 characters, and because of the ë it goes out as two parts. Write nieuwe gerechten instead of nieuwe ideeën and it stays one part. Check in your tool how many parts a message will become before you send it.

The sender

Send under your restaurant’s name. A text name can be eleven characters at most, so shorten it the way guests know you. Guests usually cannot reply to a text name. If you want to read replies, send from your restaurant’s phone number instead. Mention your name in the text as well, and ask your provider whether a text name has to be registered first.

The link

A link turns a text into an order, yet guests have become wary: the Fraudehelpdesk is still posting warnings about fake texts. Use your own domain with a short path, such as yourplace.nl/order, and skip general link shorteners. A shortener hides where the link goes, and hiding is exactly what a fake message does. Keep to one link per message, pointing straight at the ordering screen.

The tone

Write the way you talk at the counter. Say what it is, until when it holds and how to order, ask the guest one thing, and leave out capitals and exclamation marks. Offer something worth having, such as a dessert or a table on a busy night. A real deadline, such as order before 5 pm, beats writing today only every single week. Sounding like yourself is fine, as long as it fits your site and your menu.

Six messages that suit a restaurant

Six examples. They are written in English here, but your guests will read Dutch. The counts treat [Restaurant] and [First name] as twelve characters each, so count again with your own name.

Send the new dish to guests who ordered something similar before, and announce it before it reaches the menu.

Win-back texts go to guests who have been quiet longer than their own habit. Someone who normally orders every second week and has gone silent for six has slipped away. Offer a product rather than a percentage. The article on customer retention goes further.

For the quiet day, choose your weakest day. Run one fixed deal and repeat it weekly so guests remember it.

A birthday text only works if you asked for the birthday with consent and explained what for. Ask for day and month, not the year of birth. A gift pairs well with a loyalty programme.

The event text suits a restaurant near a theatre, stadium or exhibition hall. Offer a table rather than a discount.

A seventh message is the request for a review. Treat it as advertising: only guests with consent, with an unsubscribe included. Ask everyone who consented, not only the guests you think were happy, and point to your Google Business Profile.

Set up once whatever hangs on a moment: the welcome text, the birthday, the follow-up after an order. Schedule by hand whatever hangs on the calendar.

How often, when and to whom

One to four messages a month fits most restaurants. Start with two, tell people at sign-up how many to expect and keep your word.

A best send time quoted in some report says little about your guests. Send when they are choosing: late morning for lunch, mid-afternoon for dinner, Thursday or Friday for the weekend. Stay clear of the hours before eight in the morning and after nine at night. That is a rule of thumb, out of courtesy.

Remember your kitchen. A message to five hundred numbers at four o’clock can bury you by six. Send in batches, cap the offer by time or quantity, and send nothing on a night that is already full.

Do not send everyone the same text. Split guests into new and returning, then by what they ordered: someone who always orders vegetarian has no interest in the steak of the week. If a message uses a first name or an earlier order, say so in your privacy statement.

Measuring what it brings in

Track five numbers for every message:

• Messages delivered
• Taps on the link
• Orders with the code or the link, within 48 hours
• Unsubscribes
• What the message cost, plus the discount or the giveaway

Give every offer its own code or link path, such as yourplace.nl/tuesday, so each order can be traced to its message. The arithmetic is where people go wrong. Say you text 500 numbers with a free tiramisu. A message costs €0.07, and a tiramisu costs you €1.40 in ingredients. Your average order is €27.25 including 9% VAT, which is €25.00 without. Twenty orders arrive with the code.

Twenty orders, of which twelve are extra. The tiramisu went to all twenty. If you only count how many people used the code, you flatter yourself. Look at the weeks before: how many orders did the same guests place on an ordinary Tuesday?

Unsubscribes tell you the rest. A jump after one message points at that message. A steady climb means you send too often or to the wrong group. Read what guests text back, and what they say at the counter, as well.

To compare two versions, change one thing at a time. A list of a few hundred numbers makes the gap between two messages hard to trust, so repeat the test several times.

WhatsApp Business next to SMS

Many guests are in WhatsApp every day, and some restaurants already take bookings there. Using it for promotion brings the same Dutch rules as SMS, plus WhatsApp’s own. The ACM lists WhatsApp right next to email: consent beforehand, your name in the message and a way to unsubscribe. On top of that, WhatsApp only lets you message people who gave you their number and agreed to further messages, and it expects you to honour any request to stop.

The sending works differently too. When a guest writes to you, a 24-hour window opens in which you can answer freely. Outside it, only a template will do: a fixed text that Meta, the company behind WhatsApp, reviews first and files under a category such as marketing. A rejected template cannot be sent.

Then there is the price. Since 1 July 2025 Meta charges per delivered message, at a rate that depends on country and category, so you pay even when the guest never opens it. Rates change, so look up the Netherlands on Meta’s rate page.

Choose by purpose. Announcing a deal to a list is simpler and more predictable by SMS. If you want guests to ask questions or book, WhatsApp is the natural home. If you use both, ask for consent per channel, because a yes to SMS is not a yes to WhatsApp. Use a business number, and never add guests to a group: every member would see everyone else’s number.

What to skip, and where to start on Monday

These are the mistakes that turn up most.

What to do on Monday, in this order:

1. Add a box for SMS consent at checkout, with an explanation and not ticked in advance.
2. Pick a provider with a sender name, an automatic unsubscribe and a data processing agreement.
3. Write the welcome text, count the characters and look at it on two different phones.
4. Schedule one message for your quietest day, to a small group first, and write down how many orders you normally get that day.

A modest list of guests who said yes, and the occasional message worth reading: that is SMS marketing that works.