Success story: Chilango
Chilango was born out of an absolute love of Mexican food by Co-Founders Eric Partaker and Dan Houghton, who opened their first restaurant in London on Upper Street in 2007. Several years later and with 13-sites primarily across London and including Birmingham and Manchester, the brand continues to go from strength to strength, living by and breathing its Mexican food mantra.
The challenge
Chilango was opening their first restaurant in Birmingham, so they had no existing database for guests in the Birmingham area to communicate to about the opening and their free burrito day for customers. The brand had a target to reach 1,500 sign-ups to their database for the free burrito. At the time of the brief, Chilango had started to do this through a focused social promotion via Facebook. Ultimately, the results needed to deliver a queue the size of the world’s biggest burrito outside the restaurant.
Our insights
Our response to the brief started with sound research. Chilango had been live with Wireless Social since August 2018 across its estate of 12-sites. During this period, 8,600 customers had logged into Chilango’s guest Wi-Fi, boosting their existing email database to give them a solid base of contacts to use for marketing campaigns.
Our solution
We created a Facebook audience for Chilango and then incorporated it into the Chilango Facebook marketing platform – targeting all customers who had opted in to receive further information. Alongside this, we created 'lookalike audiences' which incorporated customer Facebook profiles, together with their likes, interests, ages etc, whilst finding similar profiles to those of their customers to create a huge audience of potential new ‘lookalike’ customers.
An ad was then created targeting this profile in the Birmingham area. In just 3 days, we were able to increase sign-ups to the Chilango opening burrito offer – achieving a staggering increase on the initial target of 1,500 by 53.3% – all through the smart use of Facebook integration. Data capture at this site continues to grow and is currently at 71% WiFi opt-in.
