Burger King Royal Perks - Loyalty Nurture Programme
BK Royal Perks is a sizzling hot loyalty programme that offers members mouthwatering rewards for choosing flame-grilled fast food over the countless alternatives. Here’s how Catch designed a highly personalised nurture journey in Braze to keep Burger King customers returning for more…
Client
Burger King
Industry
Retail/QSR
Type of work
- Marketing automation
What we did
- Strategy
- Design
- Technology and development
- Testing and assurance
- Copywriting
- Customer experience design
Technologies
- Braze
The challenge
Burger King New Zealand operates in one of the country's most competitive and cluttered retail categories.
When competing against other global fast-food brands with huge marketing budgets, standing out from the crowd and winning a bigger share of wallet is not as simple as out-spending and out-shouting the competition in mass media channels.
It takes a highly personalised, one-to-one nurture programme to turn an occasional, hunger-driven impulse purchase into a regular, repeat customer and fierce brand loyalist.
In May 2023, Burger King appointed Catch Design to help them design and build exactly that.
The solution
Catch was tasked with developing an omnichannel, automated, trigger-based customer engagement programme using BK’s Braze CRM platform.
The programme was centred around BK’s Royal Perks Rewards Programme, where customers earn Crowns every time they purchase in a restaurant or online that can be redeemed for free BK menu items later.
Working closely with the BK marketing team, Catch designed an end-to-end customer journey that would transform the impulsiveness and transactional nature of the fast food buying experience into a sophisticated data-driven engagement programme that encouraged members to choose BK more regularly and deliberately.
The experience starts by welcoming each new Royal Perks member with a series of trigger-based onboarding communications congratulating them for joining and teaching them how the programme works.
In the first few weeks, members are encouraged to download and use the BK app to get the most out of the programme. They are then stimulated to make purchases through the timely presentation of special offers on menu items that align with their preferences.
As the relationship goes on, customer behaviour determines what communications they receive.
If they are highly engaged and purchasing regularly, the touchpoints are all about celebrating the rewards they’re earning and keeping engagement levels up.
If the customer is less active, they receive offers and incentives to encourage the next purchase, with each offer getting progressively stronger.
Some flows automatically switch channels to capture members' attention when not engaging with emails. There are flows that acknowledge continued non-engagement and send members into a dormant state. And flows that try to re-activate dormant members with new and unique offers.
It’s sophisticated stuff, and it’s all fully automated in Braze.
The Catch team wrote and designed over 50 base email variants, app notifications and in-app messages containing limitless data variables to create a genuinely personalised experience for every Royal Perks member.
We designed the flows, wrote the copy, built the templates in Braze, and integrated them with BK’s rich data sources to create a nurture journey, showcasing substantial progress from where BK stood just a few months ago.
The results
The programme launched in late 2023, and some early results have been sizzling hot!
Every stage of the journey is measured against a control group, and some of the micro-campaigns within the overall programme have delivered results up to 29% better than the control.
The combined Catch and BK teams are already working on multivariate testing with alternate subject lines, content variations, and time-of-day deployments, all being explored to deliver the best possible results.
And that’s the beauty of always-on loyalty programmes—you can keep experimenting. You can implement a workflow and measure its performance for a while, then test a variation that might beat it.
Adopting a champion/challenger approach, where you’re always looking for ways to improve the current design, is the key to optimising automated marketing programmes like this.
This test-and-learn mindset is why we love working with the team at BK, who have fully embraced data-driven decision-making.
It feels like we’re learning by doing. And that’s what effective digital marketing is all about.
