Always-On Lifestyle Programme – Braze – McDonalds.

The Strategy: Building long-term value through personalisation

When the market went short term, we went long. We aimed to grow long term customer value, while helping our customers get more from McDonald’s. Our predictive models showed that helping fans save money would increase their value and build their affinity even further.

For millions of McDonald’s customers, the cost-of-living crisis means being more discerning. Every spending decision counts. Getting good value counts even more.

And, for every one of those customers, multiple brands are chasing their hard-earned cash, bombarding inboxes and lock screens with untargeted offers and deals.

But we’ve got a level of fandom other brands can only dream of. Instead of shouting louder, discounting harder, and focusing on the short term, we saw an opportunity to change the narrative.

We’re talking long-term thinking with a truly personalised approach. It’s about giving our fans more value now, in the moments they need us, while growing their long-term value.

“MyMcDonald’s Rewards” is key to the McDonald’s value offering. Millions of customers earn points to get free food through the loyalty programme. But our analysis showed that millions of points remained unspent. Our customers could be getting more of what they love, for less. We wanted to help them enjoy the rewards they’d already earned.

Deep predictive modelling suggested that helping our customers unlock their rewards, helping them save money, would increase their affinity and their long-term value. It’s a win-win.

Rather than bombard our fans with generic deals, our strategy was to build an automated, multi-channel lifecycle programme. Content and offers would be dynamically personalised to each customer, meeting them in the moment they needed us, helping them save on their next visit, and giving them every reason to come back. All ensuring the most valuable customers always felt it.

To achieve this, we:

• Combined the power of the McDonald’s brand with complex personalisation and engaging customer experiences
• Created a fully-automated, multi-channel lifecycle programme
• Used eye-catching visuals, craveable food shots, and playful copy alongside never-been-done-before email interactivity
• Dynamically assembled 387 individual elements into over 13,000 personalised experiences

To create hyper-personalised experiences, we had to throw out the standard approach. No flowchart could contain the complexity of these journeys, not to mention the countless nuances of how a customer might move into, out of, and between different phases.

We built our programme around four key phases, with messaging that evolves alongside fans’ relationships with McDonald’s, giving them the information and inspiration they need, at the right time:

Welcome Phase. Onboarding and inspiring our brand-new fans. Educating fans on the world of MyMcDonald’s Rewards from their very first interaction.

Early Life Phase. Embedding the app and Rewards. Encouraging fans to explore, engage, and build their habits with McDonald’s.

In Life Phase. Giving our most loyal fans surprise and delight moments. Retaining and growing the most valuable customers.

Rescue Phase. Reigniting the love for lapsed fans through 100+ targeted offers. Winning back customers through personalised, timely incentives.

Throughout, we pushed the Braze platform to new places, with custom-built interactivity to engage fans. But offers weren’t the only thing behind our value pillar. We actively focused on unlocking the rewards our customers had earned but not yet used, prompting them to redeem unspent points to get their favourites for less, with enticing food imagery.

And, to build brand love, our engagement-focused comms offered up new interactivity:

• A race-the-clock delivery game, playable right there in the email
• A randomiser that showcases new products
• A carnival game that reveals the customer’s rewards points total and highlights a product they could redeem for free
• A fun quiz to help customers find a new McCafé® favourite

We deployed over 100 incentives throughout the programme, targeted to individuals based on their value, purchases, preferences, and behaviours. This blend of dynamic content, interactivity, and tailored offers, amplified by real-time data integration and advanced automation, created a programme that delivers unique, engaging experiences at unprecedented scale.

The Results: When fans are valued, loyalty follows

Results were measured using short-term control groups and long-term fallow cells. And they have proven the effectiveness of our strategy.

We’ve migrated millions of fans from the ‘Early Life’ audience to the ‘In Life’ audience — which means they reached the proven benchmark for a loyal digital fan. In fact, we’ve more than doubled the size of this loyal audience.

Before launch, 60% of active customers were redeeming their points. To help more fans get the most from MyMcDonald’s Rewards, we hoped to boost this to 75%. Instead, we smashed right past this goal and took the figure up to 82%.

In addition, the programme has been hugely successful in bringing lapsed customers back. In terms of engagement, our Lifecycle comms have an open rate of 41%, a huge increase over our standard comms, with their average open rate of 28%.

To date, the campaign has delivered a 32:1 ROI. As these are always-on journeys, the incremental revenues will only increase. Every day, the ROI gets better.