Planning the campaign 

We’ve been working as the CRM partner for McDonald’s for over a decade now. 

Recently, McDonald’s launched McDelivery – meals delivered straight to your doorstep – as a service on its ‘My McDonald’s’ app  

To help cement McDelivery in the hearts and minds of McDonald’s customers, the brand planned activity around the unique craveability of McDonald’s food. It told customers that their favourite meals were available to order straight to their door via the My McDonald’s App and drove their desire at key moments. 

Key was to understand whether tempting images of the food on offer or a more functional McDelivery message in the context of an ever-improving app would drive the best response from customers and therefore, return on investment (ROI). Email was the first channel to launch. 

Our launch activity 

The beauty of email is that, as well as offering targeting and a strong ROI, it also presented us with a great opportunity to test our messaging robustly: from images of meals that create craveability against more 

functional offer messages; to testing times of day for email send (to see how ‘breakfast people’ responded versus traditional teatime customers, for example). We are also able to look at responses from those who have already downloaded the app versus those who had yet to download it. 

Launching services through email rather than starting with broadcast media is a departure for McDonald’s, but it’s been fantastic for our CRM strategy to lead the way and make use of the channel’s benefits, whilst also gaining valuable insights. 

The results so far 

The data has shown that the use of imagery that creates craveability drives engagement and ROI, and we’re pleased to say that this is being rolled out across all media platforms as we write.  

Key pointer 

Email allows great flexibility to test and refine messaging. We have a comprehensive test matrix and will use learnings as we go along, to tweak our approach for maximum effectiveness.