Definition
Opt-in
Opt-in is a guest's explicit, recorded consent to receive marketing, and it is a legal requirement for email and SMS in most places.
An opt-in is affirmative consent: a guest actively chose to hear from you, not a pre-checked box or an address you scraped or bought. Consent is legally required for texting in the US (the TCPA) and for email and SMS across much of the world (GDPR, PECR, CASL). US email is the exception: CAN-SPAM is opt-out, not opt-in, so an opt-in there is best practice for deliverability rather than a strict legal requirement. It also protects Email deliverability, because mailing people who never agreed generates the spam complaints that ruin your sender reputation.
The encouraging part is that guests are willing when you ask at the right moment: 81% have opted in to business texts. The places to collect it are the transactions you already run, such as online ordering checkout, a reservation, wifi sign-in, or a loyalty signup. A consenting list you own as First-party data is worth far more than a rented marketplace audience you cannot lawfully market to.
Ordering, reservation, and loyalty tools capture the opt-in at the point of a transaction and store the consent record you may later need to prove. Keep that proof, and make unsubscribing genuinely easy. See email and SMS marketing and loyalty and retention.
See it in action
Your next service / Ready when you are
Less busywork. A better next shift.
Turn what you have learned into a focused brief. Start with the job that matters most, and keep the tools that already work for your restaurant.
Describe it. Review it. Keep improving it. Check connections and costs before going live.