[ CASE STUDY ]

A Fresh Approach to Acquisition for Pret A Manger

14K

'Club Pret' app installs driven across paid channels to date

£300k

in 'Pret Delivers' revenue attributed to paid media

2.2K

'Pret Delivers' sales generated across all paid channels to date

ENGINEERED
FOR
GROWTH

Pret A Manger is one of the UK’s best-known food-to-go brands, with a large estate of high street shops and a growing focus on digital customer acquisition. Alongside driving footfall and awareness for new product launches and shop openings, Pret has been investing in digital growth areas, including Club Pret and Pret Delivers, making paid media an increasingly important part of how the brand builds reach, acquires customers and supports revenue growth.

Green Ginger Digital has worked with Pret A Manger for the past 18 months across Paid Search, Paid Social and digital strategy. With activity spanning both Pret’s equity business and franchise partners, the brief quickly grew in scale and complexity. The challenge was not just to launch campaigns, but to create a more effective acquisition model across multiple services, channels and budget pots.

“A true extension of our team - that’s how I would describe the Green Ginger Digital crew. I worked closely with the team over the course of a year, delivering dozens of campaigns to help revive our digital presence across paid media channels. From paid social to drive awareness of new product launches, to acquisition campaigns to support the growth of our Club Pret subscription and Pret Delivers offering, their impact was clear. They take the time to truly understand how your business works and care as much as you do. A big shoutout to Emily and Nick for their hands-on support and to Phoebe for being an absolute superstar, managing multiple briefs, tight deadlines, and unplanned campaign changes with ease. I’m a big believer that boutique agencies make the best partners for growth, especially when having a lean in-house team. Green Ginger Digital proved to be exactly that: the best partner we could have chosen to get back on track, strengthen our brand’s digital visibility, and drive measurable growth across digital products.”

- Ana Rodrigues, Interim Senior Digital Manager (UK and EU), Pret A Manger

THE
Challenge

Pret needed paid media to do two jobs at once. Firstly, it needed to drive awareness around new product launches and shop openings. Second, it needed to support customer acquisition for Club Pret and Pret Delivers, two strategically important digital products with different audience behaviours and channel needs.

The brief became more complex after the initial launch performed strongly, and activity expanded beyond Pret’s equity business into franchise partner campaigns as well. That meant managing multiple budgets and campaign types across paid search, paid social and OOH, while still keeping a clear handle on efficiency and results.

External constraints added to the challenge. New HFSS policies limited what could appear in creative, reducing flexibility and making media choices even more critical. At the same time, some platforms offered scale but lacked the targeting granularity needed to optimise and report properly.

What they tasked us with:

To drive awareness for launches and openings while supporting acquisition
Scale Club Pret and Pret Delivers efficiently across paid channels
Understand which platforms were genuinely worth backing
Manage complexity across equity and franchise partner activity
Keep campaigns effective despite HFSS-related creative restrictions

Our
Strategy

We approached the account as a live testing and optimisation challenge. Rather than spreading the budget evenly and hoping for the best, we tested platforms thoroughly, assessed efficiency, and shifted spend toward the channels that proved they could deliver.

Key elements of our approach included:

Testing Club Pret activity across programmatic, Google Ads, Meta, and TikTok to understand which platforms could most efficiently drive subscriptions and footfall.
Identifying Meta as the strongest-performing platform for Club Pret, delivering the highest number of subscribers and the best efficiency seen in recent years.
Launching and testing TikTok as part of the Club Pret mix and as a key awareness channel, allowing us to unlock a younger target audience.
Introducing Performance Max in locations where search volume was lower, helping build upper-funnel visibility and support demand in areas where standard search alone was too limited.
Refining messaging across channels to make campaigns more consistent, despite creative restrictions introduced by HFSS policy changes.

The Results

This approach gave Pret a clearer, more effective acquisition model across Club Pret and Pret Delivers, with budget concentrated in the areas most likely to perform.

Meta became the strongest engine for Club Pret growth. Google Ads played a more effective role in capturing intent for Pret Delivers. Budget moved away from weaker-performing channels and into a tighter, more commercially grounded paid media mix.

Key outcomes included:

Paid media directly drove 14K in Club Pret app installs across all channels to date.
Paid media attributed £300K in revenue to Pret Delivers.
During testing, Meta delivered the highest volume of Club Pret subscribers and the strongest acquisition efficiency.
Pret Delivers search activity achieved an average CTR of 13.89%.
Pret maintained an average impression share of 41% across its Pret Delivers keyword banks despite a very competitive auction.

The work by Green Ginger Digital not only drove installs and sales; it also gave Pret a Manger a clearer understanding of which platforms could support future growth, where to concentrate spend, and how paid media could work harder across both equity and franchise partner activity, giving them firepower for future paid media campaigns.