Since 1971, McDonald's has been the unrivaled leader of tasty and innovative informal eating and restaurant experiences in Germany. The year 2014 marked the starting point of yet another chapter in McDonald's nationwide success story – the creation of an even more individualised, brand and restaurant experience.

At the beginning of 2014, McDonald's partnered with TRACK to build a data-driven, fully automated 1:1 digital CRM platform – the McVIP portal. This platform had to be prepared and launched within just a few weeks, in time for the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil™ promotion.

McDonald's wanted to achieve the following objectives by the end of January 2015:

• Enlarge their customer marketing database to 2 million customers

• Generate true, measurable and incremental business impact

• Achieve a positive ROI within the entire 12-month launch time frame

At the time, however, there was only a fragmented email database architecture in place (with approximately 850,000 unique accounts), limited historic marketing data and absolutely no transactional data that could be linked to individual customers or products purchased.

Within just under 12 months, the McVIP marketable universe in Germany jumped from 850,000 to 2.1 million members – that's about 2.7% of the German population (compared to only 0.5% in the USA).

Based on our proven test criteria – we selected test restaurants (approximately 600 locations) and control restaurants (approximately 80 locations) based on their previous years' sales performance, to which test and control customers (McVIPs) were assigned. The learning agenda included performing analytics on the impact of personalised communication on location guest counts, sales growth, margin and customer engagement.

The response rates to the 1:1 data-driven communication almost doubled, achieving an open-rate average of just under 40% as well as a 15% click-though rate. Several hundred thousand customers could be re-connected to the McDonald's brand.

The data-driven offer strategy led to a coupon redemption rate that was almost twice as high as the customary mass promotions. Analytically derived product bundles – i.e. Chicken McNuggets with a McFlurry – performed better when used for targeted communication.

Millions of euros in incremental revenue were generated, and single campaigns achieved up to 1,900% ROI – providing approximately 300% ROI from all related programme costs including infrastructure development and analytics.

All activities centered around a pre-defined data strategy. This involved data integration, data cleaning and qualification, data generation, and a learning agenda or analytics strategy. Five existing, isolated databases were integrated into one, single customer-view database.

We needed to establish a link between individual customer and transaction data. The imminent 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil™ and Monopoly promotions were going to be major turning points.

For the first time in the company's history, the successful and proven method of using sweep stake promotional codes on packaging was actually used to gather individually traceable purchase-behaviour data.

Promotional codes now referenced the actual product that the code was printed on, and for the first time, around 2 million purchased products could be linked back to individual customers. Approximately 1,000,000 product bundles could be matched with the known purchase behaviour of over 400,000 individual customers.

This simple, yet effective idea helped bridge the gap between customer and transactional insights that could be effectively leveraged for personalised offer communications.

We were able to enhance the value of the customer data and perform further individualised qualification by applying analytics techniques such as engagement profiles and ZIP-centroid analysis via email response data. This allowed each customer to be targeted on the basis of individual scores and attributes such as their favourite restaurants, level of brand engagement and

contextual affinity.

The existing, anonymous transactional data was used to develop analytical product bundles by applying cluster analysis. By identifying products that were most often purchased together at certain times of day and taking store type into consideration, we were able to bring to light valuable insights about product affinities. Some bundles seemed logical. But there were surprises – like some customers wanting to have a Smarties McFlurry with their Chicken McNuggets.

With little data available at the outset, data was crucial to every step in the McDonald's Germany eCRM evolution. We had to generate new data and manage it differently to get a profile of our diners and find out more about their dining behaviour.

In order to shift to a fully individualised brand and restaurant experience around the launch of McDonald's 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil™ campaign, a promotional mechanism was developed that centered around our data strategy and learning agenda.

McDonald's 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil™ promotional mechanism:

McDonald's McVIPs had the opportunity to collect promotional codes for a chance to win a trip to Brazil. This was not something new. But for the first time in McDonald's Germany history, promotional codes on product packages referenced the actual product. And not only that – customers were asked to collect a minimum of six codes to get one ticket to enter the sweepstakes. They had to scan multiple codes during one restaurant visit. So not only did we find out about single product purchases, we were able to combine codes and analytically calculate individual purchase baskets.

Offer communication strategy: combining the insights derived from anonymous product bundle analysis and customer-purchase behaviour helped us predict what would make McVIPs return to McDonald's and increase their purchase baskets – without eroding product margin. Offer bundles like Chicken McNuggets with a McFlurry or Cheeseburgers with Apple Pies as such had never been actively communicated. Offer activation by individual customers helped us learn even more about product affinities and enhance customer profiles.