Restaurant marketing software for independent restaurants

Restaurant marketing software brings back the customers who have already eaten your food. It keeps a list of everyone who orders from you directly, records what each person agreed to receive, and sends email, SMS and push messages at the moments they are most likely to order again. The useful tools also ask every customer for a Google review, run Google Ads, and show how many orders each message produced.

Three things decide whether it pays for an independent restaurant or takeaway in Ireland or the UK. The first is the list: you can only market to customers who ordered through your own website, app, phone line or till, and only on a lawful basis. The second is automation: the messages that make money send themselves after a first order, after a quiet spell, or when a reward is due. The third is measurement: a report that credits a text with 40 orders means little if most of those customers would have ordered that week anyway.

Each section below covers one part of that: channels, consent law in both countries, review requests, Google Ads budgets, costs, a worked example and a set-up plan. For Google Maps and search visibility, use the restaurant SEO guide. For points, stamps and rewards, use the restaurant loyalty programme guide.

Restaurant marketing software features

Marketing software for a restaurant does six jobs. Judge any product against each one, in this order.

Customer data sits under all six. What to collect, how to group customers and what data protection law requires for the database itself is covered in the restaurant CRM guide. This page covers what you send, when, and how to tell whether it worked.

Standalone tools and built-in marketing

There are two ways to get those jobs done. A standalone email or SMS tool connects to your ordering system by export or integration. Built-in marketing lives inside the platform that takes the orders.

A standalone email tool can suit a restaurant with a manager who writes a monthly newsletter and enjoys doing it. An owner who cooks five nights a week usually gets more from automations that run off live order data, with no exports to remember.

Marketing channels compared

Each channel has a different cost basis, a different permission rule and a different job.

The permission column is a short version of the rules in the next section. The cost column describes how providers charge, not what they charge. Get written prices from any provider you are considering. Business Profile posts belong to Google visibility work and are covered in the restaurant SEO guide.

Consent rules in Ireland and the UK

Marketing texts and emails to individuals follow their own rules, separate from general data protection. Ireland and the UK use similar rules with one difference that catches owners out: Ireland’s existing-customer exemption has a 12-month limit.

UK rules under PECR

The Information Commissioner’s Office summarises regulation 22 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations in its guidance on electronic mail marketing (checked September 2026). You must not send marketing emails or texts to individuals unless:

• they specifically consented to messages from you, for example by ticking an opt-in box; or
• they are an existing customer who bought, or negotiated to buy, a similar product or service from you, and you gave them a simple way to opt out when you collected their details and in every message since.

The second route is the “soft opt-in”. It does not cover new contacts, bought-in lists, or anyone whose details did not come from their own purchase or enquiry. The same rule applies to texts, picture messages, voicemails and direct messages on social media. You must not disguise or conceal who is sending the message, and every message needs a valid contact address for opting out.

The ICO checklist adds practical duties:

• Keep a “do not contact” list of everyone who opts out or unsubscribes.
• Screen every send against that list.
• Act on opt-outs promptly.
• Do not ask customers to forward your marketing to friends or family.
• Do not ask for friends’ contact details for marketing.

The ICO page carries a notice that the guidance is under review because of changes made by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. The Act’s explanatory notes set PECR penalties at two levels: a higher maximum of £17,500,000 or 4% of an undertaking’s total annual worldwide turnover, and a standard maximum of £8,700,000 or 2%, whichever is higher in each case.

Irish rules under S.I. 336/2011

In Ireland the rules sit in regulation 13 of the European Communities (Electronic Communications Networks and Services) (Privacy and Electronic Communications) Regulations 2011, S.I. No. 336 of 2011. The regulations define “electronic mail” to include SMS messages, so texts and emails follow the same rules.

The regulations name the Data Protection Commissioner as the body that can prosecute. For a takeaway, the 12-month rule means the customer list needs the date of each person’s last order and last marketing message, and every send should exclude contacts outside the window unless they gave consent.

Consent that holds up

Where you rely on consent rather than the existing-customer rule, UK GDPR Article 4(11) defines consent as a freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the person’s wishes, given by a statement or a clear affirmative action. Article 7 says you must be able to demonstrate consent, the request must be clearly distinguishable from other matters, and withdrawing must be as easy as giving it. Ireland’s S.I. 336/2011 puts the burden of proving consent on the sender. In both countries that means:

• Unticked boxes at your own checkout, one for email and one for SMS.
• Plain wording that names your restaurant and the kind of messages you send.
• A stored record of the date, time, channel and wording each customer saw.
• An opt-out in every message, processed automatically.
• No consent hidden in your terms and conditions.

Push notifications

Push notifications reach customers who installed your app. Platform rules apply before any campaign. Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines, section 4.5.4, say push notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing unless customers have explicitly opted in through consent language shown in the app, and the app must provide a way to opt out. On Android, Android 13 added a runtime notification permission: on new installs, notifications are off until the user grants permission.

Ask for notification permission after the first order, when the customer has a reason to want “your driver is on the way”. Ask separately, in plain words, before sending offers.

Marketplace customers

Customer details that arrive with a Just Eat, Deliveroo or Uber Eats order are covered by your partner agreement with that platform and by the platform’s privacy terms, not by your own consent records. Read your agreement before you add any app customer to a marketing list. Keep the apps for discovery. The practical ways to win direct orders from people who first found you on an app are in the direct orders playbook.

Consent checklist

• Source: every contact came from your own website, app, phone line or till.
• Basis: each contact has recorded consent or a valid existing-customer basis, with the order date stored.
• Irish 12-month window: existing-customer contacts with no order and no marketing message in 12 months are excluded from marketing sends.
• Checkout: separate unticked boxes for email and SMS, in plain wording.
• Identity: your restaurant name in every message.
• Opt-out: an unsubscribe link in every email, and a reply or link opt-out in every text.
• Suppression list: opted-out contacts kept on a do-not-contact list and screened before every send.
• Push: promotional push only to app users who opted in inside the app.
• Marketplace data: nothing imported from app orders without checking the partner agreement.

Restaurant marketing automation

Automations are messages that send themselves when something happens. For a busy owner they matter more than campaigns, because they run on the nights nobody has time to write anything.

Reward and referral mechanics, and what rewards cost, are covered in the loyalty programme guide. Ideas for rewards by restaurant type are in the restaurant loyalty programme ideas list.

Setting the win-back window

A fixed 30-day rule sends offers too early to monthly customers and too late to weekly ones. Use your own order data:

1. List the customers who ordered at least three times in the last six months.
2. For each one, work out the average number of days between orders.
3. Group them: weekly (under 10 days), fortnightly (10 to 20 days), monthly (21 to 40 days), occasional (over 40 days).
4. Set each group’s win-back trigger at roughly twice its usual gap. A weekly customer who has not ordered in 14 days is late. A monthly customer at 14 days is not.
5. Send the win-back once per lapse, and stop the automation the moment the customer orders.

Example: a customer ordered on 1, 9, 16 and 25 March. The gaps are 8, 7 and 9 days, an average of 8 days. A trigger at 16 days sends on 10 April if no order has arrived.

Rules for automations

• One offer at a time. A customer in the win-back flow should not also receive the weekly campaign discount.
• Quiet hours. No texts late at night or early in the morning.
• Frequency cap. Set a maximum number of marketing messages per customer per week, across all channels together.
• Stop on order. Every automation ends when the customer orders.
• Stop on opt-out. An SMS opt-out stops SMS at once. Email continues only where the customer still has a valid email basis.
• Held-back group. Leave a random share of each automation’s audience out, so you can see what the message adds.

Email, SMS and push campaigns

Campaigns are one-off sends: a new menu, bank holiday opening hours, a match-night deal, a new delivery area. They sit alongside the automations.

Restaurant email marketing

Email is the cheapest channel per message and the only one that carries a full menu, photos and a story. Its weakness is the inbox: filtering, tabs, and customers who ignore newsletters.

Gmail publishes email sender guidelines that affect any restaurant emailing Gmail addresses (checked September 2026):

• All senders: SPF or DKIM authentication for the sending domain, valid forward and reverse DNS records, TLS connections, and a spam rate in Google’s Postmaster Tools below 0.3%.
• Senders of 5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail: both SPF and DKIM, DMARC, a From: address domain aligned with SPF or DKIM, and one-click unsubscribe on marketing messages.
• Spam rate target: Google advises keeping the spam rate below 0.10% and never reaching 0.30%.

Ask your provider whether your emails are sent from your own domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place. A restaurant email that lands in spam earns nothing, however good the photo.

What works in a restaurant email:

• One subject line that names the food or the reason, such as “Slow-cooked lamb shoulder is back, Friday to Sunday”.
• One photo of the dish, taken on the pass.
• One button that goes straight to ordering.
• Opening hours, especially any change.
• A footer with your restaurant name, address and an unsubscribe link.

Menu ideas that raise the value of each order, such as meal deals and add-ons, are covered in the average order value guide.

Restaurant SMS marketing

SMS is short and read quickly, which suits same-day prompts a few hours before service. It is usually billed per segment, and segments are easy to waste. Twilio’s explanation of SMS character limits sets out how segments work:

One emoji switches the whole message to Unicode. Twilio’s own example is a 140-character message with one non-GSM character, which goes as two segments. Twilio charges per segment. Curly apostrophes and quotation marks pasted from a word processor can trigger the same switch, so type texts directly into the marketing tool.

A single-segment example, under 160 standard characters:

“Casa Nonna: wood-fired pizzas are back tonight from 5pm. 15% off when you order on our website before 7pm. Reply STOP to opt out”

Add one pizza emoji and the same text runs past 70 Unicode characters, so it goes as two segments and costs twice as much.

Rules for restaurant texts:

• Name the restaurant first, because the sender may show as a number.
• Give one reason to order today, with a time limit.
• Include the opt-out in every text.
• Send once or twice a month at most to the whole list, and use automations for the rest.
• Send in the afternoon, a few hours before the evening rush, so the kitchen is ready for the orders.

Restaurant push notifications

Push works for customers who installed your app and allowed notifications. Order updates, such as “your order is ready” and “your driver is on the way”, are what most customers allowed notifications for. Offers go only to users who opted in to promotions inside the app, as Apple’s guideline requires. Keep push messages to one short line, send offers rarely, and watch for customers switching notifications off after a send.

Review requests without gating

A review request is a short message after an order with a link to your Google review form. It is the simplest automation to set up and the easiest to get wrong.

Review gating means filtering who gets asked. Google’s Maps user contributed content policy prohibits discouraging or prohibiting negative reviews, selectively soliciting positive reviews, offering payment, discounts or free goods for reviews, and requiring or pressuring people to review while on the premises. Google’s tips on getting more reviews repeat that offering incentives in exchange for reviews, or for changing or removing negative reviews, is strictly prohibited.

In the UK, Schedule 20, paragraph 13 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 bans fake reviews and reviews that conceal an incentive, and covers publishing reviews in a misleading way. The CMA’s fake reviews guidance CMA208, published 4 April 2025, says at paragraph 4.4 that traders should not interfere with people’s ability to leave negative reviews, including by arbitrarily stopping and starting review invitations. Paragraph 4.5 says cherry-picking can be done by encouraging just those who are satisfied to leave reviews. In Ireland, Citizens Information lists paying people to write fake reviews, and claiming reviews come from real customers without verifying them, as unfair sales practices.

What gating looks like in a restaurant:

• A star-rating filter. “How did we do, 1 to 5”, where only 4s and 5s get the Google link and 1s to 3s go to a private form.
• Selective handing out of review cards to tables that seemed happy.
• Switching requests off during a bad week and back on afterwards.
• “Free dessert for a review” on a table card or in a bag.

You can still collect private feedback. Send the same Google review link to every customer, and give every customer a separate way to contact you directly. The private channel must never replace the review link for unhappy customers.

Review request settings

Measure reviews gained per 100 orders each month, the average rating trend, and the share of reviews you replied to. How reviews feed Google’s local ranking, and how to reply, is in the restaurant SEO guide.

Google Ads for restaurants

Google Ads puts your restaurant in front of people searching nearby who have not ordered from you yet. It is the one marketing channel on this page aimed mainly at new customers.

For a restaurant with a verified Business Profile, the local campaign type is Performance Max for store goals. Google’s help page on Performance Max for store goals (checked September 2026) says:

• Set-up: you link your Business Profile or select affiliate locations, and provide store locations, a budget and ad assets.
• Automation: Google’s systems set bids, placements and combinations of your assets.
• Placements: Google Maps, the Search Network, YouTube, the Display Network, Business Profiles, Gmail and Waze.
• Goal: store visits, store sales and local actions such as call clicks and direction clicks.
• Targeting: radius targeting based on your locations, population density and other factors.

Calls and direction requests suit dine-in and collection. For delivery, check that the campaign’s results can be tied to orders on your own ordering site, or you will be judging the spend on taps that may never become orders.

Budget rules

Google’s help page on average daily budgets sets two limits for most campaigns:

Daily spend moves around. Plan the month on the monthly charging limit, not the daily figure.

Break-even orders

Work out, before launch, how many orders the campaign needs just to cover its cost. Example only, using the order figures from the worked example further down:

• Ireland: a €32.70 order including 9% VAT is €30.00 excluding VAT. Take off a Stripe fee of €0.74 and food and packaging of €9.00, and each full-price order contributes €20.26. €456 ÷ €20.26 = 22.5, so the campaign needs 23 new orders a month to break even on first orders.
• UK: a £30.00 order including 20% VAT is £25.00. Take off a Stripe fee of £0.65 and food and packaging of £7.50, and each order contributes £16.85. £364.80 ÷ £16.85 = 21.6, so the campaign needs 22 orders.

Second and third orders from those customers carry no ad cost, which is where paid acquisition can pay back. Do not count on them until your own reports show how often new customers return. The repeat customer rate report is covered in the restaurant analytics guide.

Google Ads checklist

• Business Profile verified, accurate and linked to the Ads account.
• Ordering site tracks completed orders from ad clicks.
• Budget set from the monthly charging limit you can afford.
• Break-even orders calculated before launch.
• Assets: real dish photos, your logo, and short headlines naming cuisine and area.
• Review date in the diary four weeks after launch.

Restaurant marketing software costs

Marketing costs come in more lines than the monthly subscription.

Card fees apply to discounted orders too. For reference, Stripe’s Irish pricing lists 1.5% + €0.25 for standard EEA cards, 2.8% + €0.25 for premium EEA cards and 2.5% + €0.25 for UK cards. Stripe’s UK pricing lists 1.5% + 20p for standard UK cards and 2.8% + 20p for premium UK cards. Both checked September 2026.

The discount is often the biggest cost of a campaign, and it is the one reports hide. In the worked example below, the discount given to customers who would have ordered anyway costs more than the texts.

Worked example: win-back SMS campaign

Example only. The restaurant, order values, response rates and SMS prices are illustrative, not quotes or benchmarks. Use your own figures.

A takeaway has 300 customers with a valid marketing basis who have not ordered in more than twice their usual gap. It texts 240 of them a 10% discount valid for seven days, and holds back 60 chosen at random as a comparison group. Every text is a single segment.

The maths, Ireland:

1. Held-back order rate: 2 ÷ 60 = 3.33%. Orders the texted group would have placed anyway: 240 × 3.33% = 8. Extra orders: 18 − 8 = 10.
2. Discounted price: €32.70 × 0.9 = €29.43. Excluding VAT at 9%: €29.43 ÷ 1.09 = €27.00. Revenue’s Tax and Duty Manual confirms the second reduced rate for hot takeaway food from 1 July 2026, set at 9% on Revenue’s current VAT rates page. Soft drinks and alcohol stay at the standard rate, so this example assumes food only.
3. Stripe fee: 1.5% × €29.43 = €0.44, plus €0.25 = €0.69.
4. Contribution per extra order: €27.00 − €0.69 − €9.00 = €17.31. Ten extra orders: €173.10.
5. Customers who would have ordered anyway paid €3.00 less excluding VAT (€30.00 against €27.00), and their Stripe fee fell by €0.05 (€0.74 against €0.69). Cost per order: €2.95. Eight orders: €23.60.
6. Texts: 240 × €0.08 = €19.20.
7. Net gain: €173.10 − €23.60 − €19.20 = €130.30.

The maths, UK:

1. Extra orders: 10, as above.
2. Discounted price: £30.00 × 0.9 = £27.00. Hot takeaway food is standard-rated at 20% under HMRC VAT Notice 709/1, so £27.00 ÷ 1.2 = £22.50.
3. Stripe fee: 1.5% × £27.00 = £0.405, plus 20p = £0.61 rounded.
4. Contribution per extra order: £22.50 − £0.61 − £7.50 = £14.39. Ten extra orders: £143.90.
5. Customers who would have ordered anyway paid £2.50 less excluding VAT, and their Stripe fee fell by £0.04. Cost per order: £2.46. Eight orders: £19.68.
6. Texts: 240 × £0.06 = £14.40.
7. Net gain: £143.90 − £19.68 − £14.40 = £109.82.

A typical campaign report would show 18 orders and €529.74 of sales (18 × €29.43) against €19.20 of texts. The real gain is €130.30, before staff time and fixed costs. With only 60 people held back, one extra order in the comparison group changes the answer a lot, so run the same test three times before deciding a campaign works. If the extra orders had come through a marketplace instead of your own site, commission would come off each one first; the marketplace commission guide has the current fee structures.

Measuring marketing return

Opens and clicks show that a message was seen. Orders, and the orders that would not have happened without the message, show whether it paid.

Held-back comparison steps

1. Choose the audience, such as lapsed customers or customers with one order.
2. Hold back 10% to 20% at random, for example everyone whose phone number ends in 0 or 1.
3. Send the message to everyone else.
4. After the window closes, count orders in both groups.
5. Work out extra orders and net gain with the formulas above.
6. Repeat at least three times before deciding, because small groups swing.

Weekly sales, channel mix and customer reports sit in your analytics, not your marketing tool. The restaurant analytics guide sets out a weekly routine that includes marketing results.

Marketing software set-up steps

1. Check the list. Export your customer list. Remove anyone without a recorded consent or a valid existing-customer basis. In Ireland, apply the 12-month window.
2. Fix the checkout. Add separate unticked boxes for email and SMS to your own online checkout, with plain wording. Record the date and wording with each permission.
3. Connect Google. Connect your Business Profile if your software supports it, and create your review link on a computer.
4. Switch on review requests. Every completed direct order, at the timings in the settings table, with no filter and no offer.
5. Build three automations. Welcome, second-order nudge and win-back, each with a held-back group.
6. Set the guard rails. Frequency cap, quiet hours, stop on order, stop on opt-out.
7. Authenticate email. Ask your provider to confirm SPF, DKIM and DMARC for your sending domain.
8. Plan four campaigns for the next month around real dates: paydays, big matches, bank holidays, a new dish.
9. Set up Google Ads only after steps 1 to 8, with a budget based on the monthly charging limit and break-even orders worked out.
10. Review after 30 days. Net gain per automation and campaign, unsubscribe rate, reviews per 100 orders. Keep what paid, change what did not.

Questions to ask a restaurant marketing software provider

1. Does every order from the till, phone, website and app create or update a customer profile automatically?
2. How are email and SMS permissions recorded, and can I export the history with dates and wording?
3. Can I apply Ireland’s 12-month existing-customer window automatically?
4. What does each SMS segment cost to Irish and UK mobiles, and is it included in the monthly price?
5. Are emails sent from my own domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC?
6. Which automations come ready to use, and do they stop when a customer orders or opts out?
7. Do review requests go to every customer, with no rating filter?
8. Can I hold back a random comparison group, and does the report show extra orders and discount cost?
9. Is there a fee on Google Ads spend?
10. What is the contract length and notice period?
11. Can I export my full customer list, with order history and permissions, if I leave?
12. Who sets up the templates and automations, and is that included?

Common restaurant marketing mistakes

• Uploading app customers. Details from marketplace orders are not your marketing list.
• Pre-ticked or bundled consent. Consent must be a clear affirmative action and easy to withdraw.
• Ignoring Ireland’s 12-month rule. Old customers with no recent order or message fall outside the exemption.
• Emoji in every text. One emoji can double the segments you pay for.
• Discounts in every message. Regulars learn to wait for the code, and the discount lands on orders you would have had anyway.
• Gating review requests. Filtering by rating breaks Google’s policy and, in the UK, can mislead under the CMA guidance.
• Judging on attributed sales. Without a held-back group, reports credit messages with orders they did not cause.
• Ads before basics. Paying for clicks while the Business Profile has wrong hours and the ordering page is slow on a phone.
• No frequency cap. Automations and campaigns stack up and one customer gets four messages in a week.

Eclyde marketing tools

Eclyde is the restaurant growth platform for independent restaurants in Ireland and the UK. Marketing sits in the same system that takes the orders, so customer profiles build up from direct orders without exports.

• Email and SMS campaigns to your own customers.
• Push notifications.
• Automated marketing and personalised promotions.
• Review requests after orders. Every customer is asked. There is no review gating.
• Google Business Profile connection that shows your reviews, with AI-drafted replies.
• Google Ads campaigns run from Eclyde using ad credits.
• Customer profiles with order history and insights: who your customers are, what they order, how often, and their favourite items. The restaurant owns this data.
• Loyalty: points-based loyalty with rewards, referral rewards and discount codes.
• Analytics: a sales dashboard and AI insights.

Marketplaces stay in place for discovery. Eclyde’s job is turning the customers they bring into direct, repeat customers on the restaurant’s own branded ordering website, where there is no Eclyde commission on direct orders. How that ordering website works is covered in the online ordering system guide.

Pricing is €499 to launch, which covers menu build, website and ordering set-up, POS and printer configuration, customer import, staff onboarding, testing and go-live support. It is refunded in full within 30 days if Eclyde is not right for the restaurant. After that it is €99 a month for the whole platform, with no limits on orders or customers. Online payments go through the restaurant’s own Stripe account. See the pricing page for details.

If you already run a newsletter in a standalone email tool, your ordering system syncs customers to it reliably, and you have someone to write it, a separate marketing platform may add little. Eclyde suits owners who want ordering, POS, customers and marketing in one place and would rather the messages ran themselves.

Your marketing numbers

Before choosing any marketing tool, count three things: how many customers you can lawfully message today, how many direct orders you took last month, and how many Google reviews you gained in that month. Those three numbers show whether the list, the orders or the reviews need work first. Then run the free Eclyde restaurant audit for a view of how your restaurant shows up online before you spend on software or ads. Start with one automation and one held-back group, and judge the result on net gain, not clicks.