The more the Maray-er

The more the Maray-er.

Since opening in Liverpool in the summer of ‘14, Maray have grown to three locations across the city, 2 Maray sites, plus a fantastic bar: The One O'Clock Gun. And seen as they’ve recently been smashing it so much, for their latest venture, they've expanded into new territory; Manchester.

They joined Airship in January 2021 and later Toggle in April of 2021 and, quite honestly, have translated their habit of ‘smashing it’ into the digital world, too.

Moving to a new city is hard for anyone, let alone a brand with such a loved reputation in a different city… it's sort of like starting all over again. But Maray took on this challenge with the unbeatable swagger that they take on anything facing them. 

These guys used Airship to help launch their Manchester restaurant. How? They created a signup form with our form builder, and turned the social media volume up to a new Mancunian audience, directing everyone to leave their details using the form. They got over 3000 contacts!

Once the data was in, using our email builder, they sent out an email with a link to book a table to everyone who signed up for the soft launch. It sold out in 10 minutes (so, they’re practically the Bruno Mars of restaurant launches, right?). This phenomenal piece of marketing will ensure their presence will be known right from the get go across the north west!

But they didn't stop there. They used Toggle to distribute 1765 little treats in order to incentivise visits from all that signed up. Out of these, they've managed to get 21.1% of recipients come in and complete the redemption of their Toggle gift, sent from their Airship email!

Maray’s very own Tom White has said: 

“Airship has become an integral piece of kit within our marketing strategy over the last 18 months, and we knew that when it came to launching our brand in a new city we would utilise its features as best as possible to execute our vision. With it being a new territory, we needed to generate a captive audience straight off the bat so that we’d have the ability to drive loyalty and repeat visits even after the fanfare of opening had died down. 

We have always liked to treat our subscribers well, giving them first dibs on anything we’re up to - we want it to feel exclusive and as a member of our email list you should feel like you’re getting real value from it. So to that end, we created a unique subscribe form and welcome journey purely for the new Manchester clientele base - from the beginning of the social and P&R campaign the primary CTA was to subscribe to this form ‘for a chance to be part of our opening week celebrations’.  We then ramped this up midway through the campaign by revealing that we would be launching the restaurant with two days of 50% off food as part of our opening week, and to join the list to be sent an exclusive booking link. 

Working with local agency Eat MCR to amplify this message, we saw subscribes go through the roof, so that when the time came to release the booking link for those dates we were at over 3,000. The reservations for those dates went after 10 minutes, which was great but also meant there were a lot of people left disappointed! So as a consolation prize, we then used Airship’s voucher mechanic to send the segment a complimentary gift card from Toggle for a portion of hummus and flatbread to enjoy on their first visit, which was very well received! 

My favourite thing about this whole campaign is that you can put hummus in your Apple Wallet, it’s just hilarious and brilliant. “