Industry
Food & deliveryUse case
Cross-sell & upsell Re-engagement RetentionMessaging channel
RCSRegion
North AmericaKey takeaways
Where the locals eat
Felipe’s Mexican Taqueria is a brand that treats its guests like neighbors, because they are. As a staple in New Orleans for nearly 20 years, Felipe’s has built their reputation the old-fashioned way: by being part of the city.
When Felipe’s wins an award, guests get a thank-you text with a discount code. When a neighborhood floods, residents on that street get a message: come in, margarita’s on us. When Drew Brees makes the Hall of Fame, there’s a send for that too.
Their ability to respond to what’s actually happening in the community is integral to keeping that connection alive at scale.
We don’t take ourselves too seriously... our mission is to throw a party every day. But we’re not built on generic relationships, and sending guests a message written three months ago doesn’t work. That’s not how people react; they want real and in the moment.
Texting at scale should not be this hard…
Felipe’s has been in the text marketing game for a decade, and their instincts were right from the start: send when people are deciding where to eat. Hit them at 10:30 when they’re thinking about lunch. At 2:00 when happy hour is on the brain. Their only rule? Every send has to be worth opening. A real offer, not a tap on the shoulder for the sake of some quick impressions.
With SMS, delivering tens of thousands of messages took hours and came with a high rejection rate. Some guests were receiving messages at 3 AM, and the team spent more time chasing arbitrary sender scores than planning meaningful campaigns. Because delivery speed was so unreliable, Felipe’s resorted to sending day-of promotions a day early, just to make sure they’d actually arrive in time.
For a restaurant whose entire messaging strategy depends on reaching people in the moment of a passing appetite, this was obviously an unsustainable trade-off.
With traditional SMS it’s difficult to get 50k messages out at the right time, and it really restricted our ability to have fun with our sends. Not to mention it required a much more IT-savvy person to run it.
13 minutes, zero failures
RCS launched while Felipe’s was in the middle of their SMS struggles. For a company their size, getting on RCS that early was unusual, but the opportunity for a better way to reach their guests was obvious: branded identity, rich media, faster delivery, and no character limit penalties for using emojis.
OneSignal’s support team walked them through each step of the RCS approval process, flagging what needed to change in their opt-in verbiage, reviewing submissions, and providing feedback until the application was solid.
Once approved, the difference was immediate.
A send to nearly 50,000 subscribers that used to take hours now goes out in 13 minutes, with zero failed messages. Only a small number were rejected, with the rest delivered cleanly via RCS. Felipe’s built an exclusion segment for subscribers where RCS doesn’t work, keeping their sends fast and their delivery rates high.
With RCS, speed was a game-changer for us to target people when they’re making their decisions or for participating in current events around the community.
Once we got approved, we went from taking a full day to send messages to delivering sometimes in 7-8 minutes at scale.
What started as a fix for delivery speed turned out to move the needle on sales as well. Across 10 comparable promotional campaigns run via SMS in 2025 and RCS in 2026, RCS-driven promotions outperformed their SMS equivalents 7 out of 10 times.
Recognized before the message is read
RCS didn’t just get messages there faster, it changed what recipients saw when they arrived. With SMS, most messages arrived from an unrecognized 10-digit number, indistinguishable from spam.
With RCS, every message arrives with Felipe’s name, logo, and brand identity attached. Before a single word is read, the recipient knows who it’s from and that it’s legitimate.
We want to have a back and forth conversation with our guests, and RCS is outstanding for that. We want them to know we’re not spamming them and we’re here to offer substantial value. The trust you build by showing up as your own brand is huge. So many big companies still don’t even have that.
How Felipe’s builds a send
Felipe’s keeps a calendar of planned promotions for the year (things like national food holidays, seasonal offers, recurring specials) but leaves room for the real-time, in-the-moment sends that define their brand.
The team recently connected OneSignal’s MCP server to ChatGPT, which lets them pull subscriber counts, check segment sizes, and draft message variations without leaving their workflow.
Having OneSignal data accessible inside the tools they’re already using has started to streamline the planning of each send.
Where RCS goes from here
When someone from the home office visits a location during a promotion and asks guests how they heard about it, the answer is almost always the same: the text. Social and everything else barely register. Since making the switch to RCS, Felipe’s has seen a 5% increase in promo-driven sales, with two standout campaigns seeing sales jump over 20%.
Felipe’s uses Toast as their POS, and they’ve started pulling guest data into OneSignal to build smarter segments, setting the foundations for an even more targeted conversation. The ability to eventually message a lapsed regular with an offer tied to what they actually order is the next step in making every send feel personal.
As for brands still on the fence about RCS? Lon didn’t hesitate:
Start the process now, because it is going to change the game. It represents your brand the way you want it to, as if you were talking to guests face-to-face.
Felipe’s built its reputation by staying connected to its neighbors. RCS helps ensure they hear from Felipe’s at the right time and in a way that unmistakably represents the brand.
