Por Qué Quesadillas?

Written By: THOMAS BUTTA Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Airship

Quesadillas might seem like a strange thing to highlight as an amazing digital experience innovation for 2021, but stick with me and you’ll see how the ingredients can create an app-vantage for your business too.

Recently, Airship held its annual global forum, Elevate 2021, for customers and everyone interested in mastering mobile app experiences. Great stories were shared by leading brands, but none were as compelling as Chipotle’s decade-plus digital transformation story.

According to Nicole West, VP Digital Strategy & Product, and as reported in its latest earnings call, the brand now has 24.5 million Chipotle Rewards members, a 40% year-over-year increase, and its highest margin transaction, digital pickup orders, now represents slightly more than half of digital sales in Q3 2021. It’s clear Chipotle has more than a few things to teach everyone about innovating the consumer’s digital experience.

After years of being the top-requested menu item, it was just this year that Chipotle actually added quesadillas to its menu. It turns out that quesadillas are a timeintensive item to prepare in-restaurant, which can slow down throughput. So, to protect the customer experience and introduce more people to its app and mobile ordering, the only way to order its top-requested quesadilla item is through the Chipotle app or Chipotle.com.

Chipotle is treating its app as a preferred destination for its customers. Customers get a convenient, seamless, and easy experience, made possible by operational investments in digital kitchens and “Chipotlanes,” where there is neither a menuboard nor intercom, as these are dedicated exclusively as drivethru pickup lanes for digital orders.

Clearly, quesadillas as well as the market launch of a smoked brisket offering, which Chipotle Rewards members could order two days before anyone else, are just a couple of the tasty ways the brand aims to expand its digital engagement with existing and new customers. Chipotle also revamped Chipotle Rewards, its app-centric loyalty program introduced in 2019, to now give customers more choice in how they prefer to engage and be rewarded. Chipotle has even gamified the experience for the first time with bonus extras. For Chipotle, the digital payoff is plentiful — higher-frequency and more loyal customers, and better margins. Chipotle’s new digital imperative is indicative of what we’re seeing across multiple industry categories, age groups, and geographic markets.

The importance of meaningful rewards was driven home by Elevate keynote speaker Jonathan Kay, co-founder and CEO of Apptopia, who shared data across quick-service-restaurant (QSR) brands that mapped the direct links between rewards program membership, company revenues and app sessions. While free food is always an incentive to pull people in, it’s the continual care and feeding of these programs that sustain engagement, improve the customer’s experience and drive critical business results going forward.

As a point of comparison, Kay detailed Burger King’s nationwide rollout of its rewards program followed a week later by a celebrity-endorsed meal campaign. Instead of directing consumers to its BK app, BK directed them to a website with a call to action to make their first order.

Even if customers were to type the website into their mobile phone to make their first order, BK didn’t capture those users — and it shows in the comparative results. Similar campaigns by QSR brands drove customers to the app where they saw massive growth in downloads, with some brands increasing their entire Daily Active User base at rates of 30% to +50% greater three months after the original free food promotion ended.

Since launching its rewards program in 2019, Chipotle has far exceeded the market’s average usage, with the Q2 2021 peak a result from a retro-racing video game where loyalty members competed for prizes that included a new Tesla.

The big takeaway — and why quesadillas are one of the top digital innovations of 2021 — is this: We now have demonstrable data and compelling brand stories that point to the app as a preferred destination for creating the highest levels of value for both brands and consumers alike.

Comparing results of similar campaigns from the top six fast food restaurants and its impact on app downloads and daily active app users three months after the promotion.