2023 Gold Email

Agency: Armadillo

Client: McDonald’s

Entry Title: McNuggets® - Heroes of Shared Occasions

Executive Summary

McDonald’s wanted to gain an even bigger share of shared occasions, typically the heartland of its major competitors. Using the wealth of order data available, could it find a way to get customers to put the Golden Arches first when planning to eat together?

Strategy

Data revealed that—after fries—Chicken McNuggets are the most-loved product among MyMcDonald’s Rewards customers. Deeper analysis of order data showed 79% of app orders containing Chicken McNuggets have the profile of a shared occasion.

This was the golden insight: McNuggets were the perfect product to drive more shared occasions, especially those high-value shared occasions at home.

The audience was segmented by McDelivery usage. The eligibility of non-users was determined by mapping customer postcodes to delivery coverage data, giving three behaviourally driven segments to focus messaging strategy around.

Sharing occasions were stimulated through an upsell to larger boxes of McNuggets alongside a playful call to action to join the wider social campaign and consider who recipients would deem #McNuggetWorthy.

Creativity

A bold, colourful campaign, where playful copy juxtaposed drool-worthy photography, allowed the product to be the hero while inspiring sharing occasions.

Maximising the creative capability of the email channel, the campaign used an innovative parallax effect so that the central McNugget appears to move down the email as the customer scrolled, eventually dunking dramatically into a delicious dip, before disappearing behind the next content piece.

Hotspots allowed customers to explore the limited-edition sauces, find out more about their favourite flavours and use a slider tool to tell us how they prefer their meal. An invitation was included to let McDonald’s know if their mates were #McNuggetWorthy or not. An interactive toggle served up relevant content on the nine or 20 boxes with each customer interaction, making each email playful, relevant, and actionable.

Results

Did this saucy campaign deliver? It did indeed. Incremental revenue that delivered an ROI of 52:1 to be precise – with a 7% uplift in McDelivery® orders among eligible customers, and 42k orders from first-time McNugget orderers.

The Team

Armadillo - Josh Lewis, Account Director - Abi Gardiner, Account Manager - Amy Hurd, Lead Campaign Manager - Andrew Sargent, Head of Insight and Analysis - Charlie Bulmer, Senior Conceptual Copywriter - Jake Hinds, Digital Designer - Steph Dearing, Developer - Will Barnes, Lead Digital Art Director - Hannah Waters, Executive Creative Director - Rob Pellow, Executive Technical Director