McDonald’s: App Anniversary Programme
What was the brief?
Create a programme to surprise & delight our customers, celebrate their first year of being part of the family on the My McDonald’s app, and show an engaged audience what they already mean to us – all while encouraging them to try more of the menu with incremental visits and spend.
What was the strategy?
We love our customers – and they love us. We wanted to build affinity further by leveraging our rich transactional data to show them just where they fit in the McDonald’s family, celebrate their custom, and inspire them to hang out with us more and try new things.
What was the campaign solution?
We created a celebration of each customer’s individual relationship with McDonald’s. Playful storytelling turns data into a picture of their own unique McDonald’s story and encourages exploration of how that compares to other customers. Designed to recognise and reward, this bright, graphic thank-you note stands out in a busy inbox.
What were the results?
This targeted customer celebration had a big impact. Compared to control, targeted customers have shown:
- A 14% increase in order frequency in the two weeks from receipt of the campaign
- 8% more cross-sell to other menu areas
- 10% increase in customer value over the next three months.
Explore a live example below
Campaign in Detail
Strategy
We had two key objectives:
1. Build Affinity and prove it’s value
Often aimed for but difficult to measure, affinity is at the heart of McDonald’s marketing.
We wanted to see if we could deepen our relationship with an already engaged group of customers by making them feel valued, inspired and excited to interact with us even more than they already are.
We have full app-based transactional history for these customers, providing an excellent opportunity to connect with them individually based on what we know about how they interact with us. We wanted to show them how they fit into our customer family and inspire their future relationship with us.
2. Cross-sell to other areas of the menu
We recognised we had a golden opportunity to drive new behaviours as well as celebrate existing ones. We created an intelligent data algorithm to ensure each customer was served a new product suggestion to try – one they hadn’t previously ordered through the app. This was dynamically positioned within each customer’s reward offer. Money off and something new. Win win!
This 1-year celebration is something we wanted to roll on and optimise. We needed to ensure we could measure the different content in the email to help us build insights for future iterations of the campaign. As a result, we challenged our creatives to create a highly personalised, dynamic and explorable piece to maximise our learning.
Solution
We have reams of transactional app data. But how do we use this to celebrate our first year together with a customer? At first, it doesn’t sound particularly inspiring!
Yet in the age of the quantified self, we spotted a brilliant opportunity to paint a picture of our relationship with each customer. Turning data into a compelling narrative not only allowed them to see what type of McDonald’s customer they were, but also to see where they fit amongst the wider McDonald’s family.
After what can only be described as some Adobe ninjitsu, transactional data was transformed into chapters of the customer story. Customers could see whether they were a ‘Night Owl Orderer’ or a ‘Breakfast Baller’ and compare that to when other customers ordered.
They could even see their most ordered item and whether they followed the trend or stood out from the crowd. Our ‘thank you’ then became an offer voucher with a nudge to the most popular in-app product they hadn’t tried yet.
The simple infographics were playful, intriguing and highly personal. We know that animation and interactivity increase both click-throughs and conversions, so the design reflects this with interactive panels and dropdowns revealing comparison data.
Using our proprietary tracking pixels, we have detailed conversion insight. This enables us to measure effectiveness and optimise content going forward.
We were very mindful of choosing data sets carefully to celebrate each customer while ensuring we met our legal and moral responsibility as a brand.