Sending Push Notifications to Mobile Users
If your restaurant is using the Thrive Mobile App, you can take advantage of this powerful marketing tool to send notifications to your users. Here's how:
Company-Wide Notifications
To send a notification to all users of your mobile app company-wide (for all associated locations), log into the Thrive Online admin portal and navigate to Set Up / Notifications.
On this screen, you can schedule a notification to be sent:
Enter the notification text: Keep it short! Different phones can handle different display lengths, and anything that goes too long will get cut off, so be sure to limit your text to approximately 40 characters. You may want to include a coupon code if you are promoting a special deal. Every notification will include your logo and the mobile app name (typically your company name) as the headline (see example below).
Schedule Delivery: Use the date picker to schedule a time for your notification. Because consumers tend to see notifications very quickly, you can use this marketing tool to drive behavior at the right time of day. Send a notification an hour before lunch or dinner to excite customers about your delicious offerings. You don't want to annoy customers with notifications during off-hours, so we will not let you schedule outside of your business hours.
Email Address: If you want to preview what the notification will look like on your phone, enter an email address associated with your account. You should download your restaurant's mobile app and register yourself on the app first, then use that e-mail address here.
Here's a preview of what the notification will look like on your phone:
Clicking on the notification will launch the mobile app.
Once you're ready, press Save Notification to schedule the message to be sent to all app users.
Note: Users can opt-out of notifications using the standard app settings on their phone. This will opt them out of all notifications, including the automatic "order success" notification that is system generated.
Once the notification has been saved but not yet sent, you can delete it from the list below:
After its been sent, you'll see statistics about how may customers clicked on the notification and how many completed an order.
Location Specific Notification
If you prefer to send a notification out for just 1 of your restaurant locations, you can do so.
Navigate to Set Up > Locations and click on the location name. Then click on the Notifications tab.
Here you can complete the same steps as above to send out a notification just to this location's users. A user is assigned a "home" location based on the 1st order they place.
Loyalty Notifications
If you are using Thrive Loyalty (SalesBuilder) to reward your customers, mobile notifications are another way to expand and improve upon your loyalty program! Any customer who is registered as a mobile user and a loyalty customer can receive notifications whenever they have received a reward or offer. Once notifications are activated in SalesBuilder, all campaign e-mails or text messages with an offer attached will also trigger a notification. In addition, if you have set your campaign e-mail to send out an expiration notice, that will also trigger a push notification. (Here's more about configuring campaign e-mails and expiration notices)
Here's a sample of what these 2 types of notifications look like:
The reward notification headline will always be "You Earned A New Reward!" and the subhead will be the name of the offer (as configured in SalesBuilder)
The expiration notification headline will always be "Your reward will expire soon!" and the subhead will be the name of the offer (as configured in SalesBuilder). This is sent out X days before expiration as configured in the SalesBuilder expiration set up.
Clicking on the notification will launch the mobile app with the Rewards screen active, so the customer can see their available rewards and click to use them.
Best Practices
Mobile notifications are a powerful tool to help you reach your customers, but opting out is just a few clicks away. While research shows that apps that send out regular notifications tend to have more engaged and long-lasting users, notifications that come too frequently or are irrelevant to the user can cause them to opt-out or even delete your app.
Use care and test results to determine what works best for your brand. We recommend limiting your notifications to no more than once or twice per week, sending fewer general notifications if your users will also be getting loyalty messages. Vary your message, so that users aren't always getting the same thing. Offering value - a special coupon code - can help users remain engaged.