2018 Gold Best use of email
14 Dec 2018
Agency: Armadillo
Client: McDonald's UK
Campaign name: McDonald's Monopoly Wiiiin!
Campaign overview
Pass Go and win at McDonald’s, Monopoly-style
The brief
To make McDonald’s Monopoly the UK’s biggest sales promotion – and a recordbreaking one.
Exciting customers to play the game would encourage as many restaurant visits as possible and grow the opted-in database – all while facing the challenges brought by GDPR.
Strategy
The campaign was planned in three phases, each with its own objective and behavioural data-driven strategy.
Phase 1: Get ready to win. A pre-launch phase designed to rev-up the anticipation and excitement of what was coming.
Die-hard fans of the game were invited to preview and share with others, and awareness was built amongst dabblers and non-players to leverage anticipation and to drive data collection from new customers.
Phase 2: Get the winning feeling. Believability of winning was crucial to success, so regular messages focused on using real-time prize totalisers and reminders of ways to play.
Phase 3: Keep the winning feeling. The real intelligence came through highly personalised player journeys.
Emails were triggered by real-time customer behaviour and designed to maximise the number of plays and inrestaurant spend.
For those actively playing, this was about momentum and increased spend by supercharging their winning ability when they bought certain meals.
Creativity
Armadillo and McDonald’s wanted customers to feel like they’d won as soon as they opened an email, and the campaign laid out three creative pillars.
Make it easy to play: the different ways to play were set out using icons and each section of the email had its own CTA to ensure the reader always knew what they needed to do next.
Make it irresistible to take part: peeling back a label in-restaurant to see what you’ve won is fun and the experience was made digital with a virtual peel to reveal design in email.
Make winning believable: insight informed the campaign that the more people believed that they could win, the more they would play.
An API link to the live prize database showed not only the loot up for grabs but how much had been won so far.
Results
Making it easy to play brought the players in by the bucketload.
Winning emails enticed an incremental 400,000 players to the online game – a conversion rate of 10%, and
representative of 13% of what the entire promotion drove across all other channels.
Triggered player journeys were responsible for driving additional visits to restaurant that resulted in an incremental spend.
And thanks to the precision targeting and efficiency of the campaign, the work achieved a return on marketing spend of 40:1 for McDonald’s.
This campaign was not just about a shortterm sales spike but driving long term customer engagement too.
746,000 new and opted-in customers grew the active database by 42% – along with the retention of 250k long-standing and hugely valuable customers.
Team
Armadillo - Steve Jefferys, Client Services Director - James Ray, Chief Executive Officer - Luke Collins, Planner - Nancy Seogalutze, Account Director - Nicholas Blake, Head of Data and Digital Operations - Jenna Morse, Digital Designer - Becci Winstone, Copywriter - Kerry Baillie, Head of Creative - Clare Sage, Account Manager - Jeremy Bourton, Senior Production Manager - Chris Quenon, Digital Motion Lead - Steve Brailey, Digital Development Lead - Aidan McClure, Database Developer - Shane Withers, Senior Digital Operations Manager
McDonald's - Andrew Ellis, Senior CRM Manager - David Jacobs, CRM Manager - Jacob Walker, CRM Manager - Amy Gledhill, Brand Manager - Chloe Bissell, Marketing Manager