McDonald’s Feel Good Adobe Journey.

The Strategy: From registered to retained, by design

The My McDonald’s app enables customers to order remotely for restaurant, Drive-thru and McDelivery. It has the data potential to create highly personalised, 1-2-1 relationships.

But many customers who registered on the app were ordering only once, or not at all. As we went into lockdown, accelerating adoption of the app was a top priority.

First we unlocked data insight. We developed an RFV segmentation that placed customers into segments, depending on recency, frequency, spend and behaviours such as use of offers. These segments ranged from newly registered customers to established, high-frequency users. By analysing customer movement between segments over time, we were able to quantify the revenue potential of increasing retention.

Then came journey mapping. Multiple journeys were identified, each mapped out in detail with a specific insight-driven content strategy playing out across both email and push channels. To make that happen, we:

• Gave new customers a nursery journey, getting them comfortable with the app and all of its benefits to maximise repeat ordering without having to incentivise
• Nudged frequent customers with cross-sell offers to get them using the app in different day-parts, growing frequency and value further
• Targeted lapsing customers based on lifetime value — reserving richer reactivation offers for more valuable customers, while addressing usage barriers for smaller spenders
• Built each journey to run automatically for up to 85 days, with customers moving automatically to the next segment based on their behavioural response

Smart, real-time, and responsive.

The Solution: Making the next action a no-brainer

The creative job was to get the customer closer to what they love, simply and on brand. To make the next action a no-brainer. To nudge along the journey in the right direction.

First, we created a system of striking visual elements and language using the McDonald’s brand to really bring the benefits of using the app to life. Insights into the McDonald’s audience show us animation and interactivity increase engagement in terms of both click-throughs and, importantly, conversions.

The creative system was built to work across every moment of the journey:

• Animated email headers used motion to either highlight app benefits or promote cross-sell offers, creating immediate impact in the inbox
• Interactive content allowed customers to skim for top line benefits or dig deeper for more information — with our proprietary tracking pixels revealing which content piqued interest to optimise future sends
• Sequential emails maintained the fine balance between creating recognition and avoiding monotony, keeping the experience fresh across up to 85 days
• Personalised push notifications delivered timely nudges on the lockscreen, creating a seamless multi-channel experience alongside email

The communications may have looked simple to the customer but it was driven by a complex engine. It meant customising the Adobe platform with a bespoke workflow and custom API to enable a rolling 24-hour customer segment migration and measurement of incremental behaviour against control — the foundation upon which the success of the programme was built.

An intelligently simple, yet compelling campaign that took customers on their own feel-good journey. Delivering 1 million communications per week.

The Results: When automation gets personal, results follow

Thanks to its precise data-driven targeting, the programme achieved a 62% improvement in engagement — open, click or redemption — compared to the average for campaigns to app users overall.

After 6 months, 7.4% more customers stayed active overall. And where journeys were targeted at one-time-only users, this figure rose to 15.2%. Intelligently targeted offers to cross-sell and up-sell customers at the right time drove a 10% increase in revenue per customer against control.

With the programme largely automated and negligible ongoing marketing costs, ROI stands at 50:1 and counting. With more customers joining the journeys every day, the incremental revenue continues to tick up.

The programme proved that when automation is built around genuine customer insight — and creativity makes every nudge feel personal — you don’t just build habit. You build value that compounds.