The Ledger

A weekly note on what actually keeps restaurants full.

Numbers you can act on. One stat, one idea, one thing to try, sent every week, written by an agency that grew up in restaurants.

From Issue No. 6, now published below

Issue 06. The Text That Waits for a Reason

Klaviyo's 2026 SMS marketing benchmarks report a 9.65 percent average click rate for automated flows and 5.6 percent for campaign texts.

This issue shows how to tie a text to a guest's action, consent, and a clear reason to send.

The Ledger, from Regulars

A new issue lands here every week. The email edition starts with our first real subscriber.

Research

Every stat we build the business on, in one place. Borrow them for your own specials board if you want.

25%+
more profit from raising customer retention by five percentage points, with published figures up to 95 percent in some industries.
Source: Bain & Company (2001), range cited by Harvard Business Review (2014)
5-9%
more revenue per additional Yelp star, for independent restaurants specifically. Chains showed no effect.
Source: Michael Luca, Harvard Business School, Working Paper 12-016
76%
of people who search for something nearby on their phone visit a business within a day.
Source: Google, Think with Google (2016)
28%
of those nearby searches end in a purchase.
Source: Google, Think with Google (2016)
35%
of marketing leaders reported $10 to $36 back for every $1 spent on email.
Source: Litmus, 2025 State of Email survey
~10%
average click rate on behavior-triggered text messages, roughly double one-off campaign blasts.
Source: Klaviyo platform data across 183,000+ businesses
42 hrs
the average time a business takes to respond to a new inquiry. 23 percent never respond at all.
Source: Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 companies (2011)
7x
more likely to reach the decision maker when you respond within an hour instead of waiting one more.
Source: Harvard Business Review (2011)

Sources