Filling Tables in Solihull
Prezzo were opening a new site in Solihull. We wanted to flip the approach, build the audience first, then sell to it.
Prezzo were opening a new site in Solihull. New sites are the hardest job in hospitality marketing - no reviews, no regulars, no word of mouth, and a fixed opening date you can't move. The standard playbook is to switch the ads on when the doors open and hope the local area notices. It works, slowly, and it's expensive. You're paying to find an audience at exactly the moment you most need them to already exist. We wanted to flip it. Build the audience first, then sell to it.
2,273 database sign-ups before the doors opened
£0.22 cost per sign-up
610 voucher claims at £0.84 each
£1.24 blended cost per action across 3,159 actions
Phase 1 -Build the list before you need it.
Five weeks out, we ran a lead generation campaign across the Solihull catchment offering an opening-week incentive in exchange for a sign-up. No booking ask, no pressure, just an easy yes.
It brought in 2,273 opted-in records at 22p each. That's a live local database Prezzo now owns outright -reachable by email forever, at zero further media cost, for a site that hadn't served a single cover yet.
Phase 2 - 0 Convert on opening.
From the launch date, we moved to booking-led creative across the local radius, with a warm retargeting layer built from everyone who'd engaged in Phase 1. The audience already knew the site existed. We weren't introducing Prezzo Italian to Solihull - we were closing people who'd already put their hand up.
276 bookings came through at £5.98 each. For a launch site with no trading history, that's roughly half what a cold-start launch typically costs us.
Phase 3 - Hold the momentum.
Post-launch we shifted to a voucher offer to convert the slower movers and keep the first six weeks trading -610 claims at 84p.
Three campaigns, one continuous flight, each one feeding the next.
What it proved...
The cheapest action in the whole campaign was the one that happened before the restaurant opened.
Lead capture ran at 22p a head and never got more expensive across 36 days -the local audience simply wasn't saturated yet. Every later phase was cheaper because that list existed. Pre-opening lead generation is now standard on every Prezzo Italian opening we run, and it's the first thing we build into any new-site brief.
Openings aren't a launch-week problem. They're a five-weeks-earlier (at least) problem.
