After Burger King UK launched a birthday discount program, they noticed that many users weren’t reporting their date of birth within the app, reducing opportunities to offer birthday discounts and effectively personalize their messaging based on age brackets.
Burger King UK quickly created a personalized, cross-channel messaging campaign designed to persuade users to self-report their birthday in exchange for a special deal on their big day.
The campaign achieved a 800% increase in the daily number of users self-reporting their date of birth. This campaign also saw a 55% direct open rate, a 22% click-to-open rate, and a 10% click-through rate (CTR). Following the launch of the campaign, 70,000 more customers navigated to the app to update their birthday, which represents 15% of total birth dates in their customer database. In addition, 60% of those who provided their birthday then went on to browse the menu or offer pages in the app.
Founded in the US in 1954, Burger King (BK) has spread across the globe, with nearly one thousand locations in the United Kingdom alone. Known for its award-winning marketing campaigns, the brand is always looking for new and innovative ways to provide value to their customers in fun and memorable ways.
To continue to evolve their customer experience, Burger King UK identified an opportunity to better segment their customers in order to provide more personalized, relevant, and valuable messages. However, customers weren’t being incentivized to share the birthday information that BK needed to support this nuanced segmentation. By leveraging Braze, the marketing team was able to collect this data by rolling out a compelling, cross-channel campaign that their customers loved.
The value of zero-party data is clear: Asking your customers to tell you about themselves helps fuel more meaningful communication and strengthens the relationship between brand and consumer. For Burger King, they were looking to collect birthday data to get a better understanding of their customer demographics and create segments to help increase revenue and boost message relevancy through more targeted offers and content.
When Burger King UK first implemented a new birthday coupon available to all users, they noticed that few customers were redeeming the coupon. They dug deeper into the data, discovering that over half of their user database had not provided their date of birth, and consequently were not receiving the birthday offer.
Recognizing that they needed to act quickly, Burger King leveraged Braze to ideate, plan, and design their birthday outreach campaign in just one day. Using real-time data from Braze Alloys technology partner Amplitude, Burger King identified customers who had signed up to the BK app but had not yet provided a birthday as part of the entry criteria. They then applied additional segmentation based on opt-in status and customer channel preference, delivering emails, push notifications, and in-app messages to customers at 11 am (just before peak app usage time) to drive as much engagement as possible. They were also able to re-skin the existing birthday promotion template within a matter of hours, utilizing the hallmark Burger King humor to engage their base.
The campaign saw impressive results, allowing Burger King UK to engage more than half of the users who already had their mobile app downloaded while also driving significant customer traffic to the app.
Since one of Burger King’s overarching brand goals is to make it fast and easy for customers to access BK their way, running a successful data-collection campaign like this one directly supports that vision. Collecting birthdays not only allows an opportunity to offer an exciting birthday gift, it also improves each individual’s overall digital experience with the brand and strengthens the consumer relationship. The birthday data made it possible for both the marketing team and the larger organization to gain additional insight into product and offer popularity across age groups, allowing Burger King to communicate with different demographics in thoughtful, relevant ways and to support more accurate targeting on other channels via Braze Audience Sync, which can help to connect brand experiences across owned and paid channels.
Outside of just this campaign, the marketing team has reported that the ease of Braze Canvas Flow, our customer journey orchestration tool, has enabled them to move away from a blanket-messaging approach to speak directly to their customers in a more personalized way than ever before. Additionally, they noted:
The ability to engage different audiences with relevant content and messaging at specific stages of the purchase funnel through custom event targeting and segmentation helps maximize their conversion potential.
Analysis tools allow them to identify opportunities for optimization and inform strategic decisions on how the CRM program can evolve in order to better respond to customers’ needs.
Frequent meetings and reviews with Braze customer success managers (CSMs) help ensure that Burger King UK is keeping up with industry trends and benchmarks, as well as making the most of the Braze platform’s innovative features.
Through implementing an on-brand cross-channel strategy to collect user birthdays, Burger King UK achieved a 55% direct open rate, a 22% click-to-open rate, and a 10% click-through rate, collecting tens of thousands of new birthdays and driving significant traffic to the menu and offers sections of the app.
The better you know your customers, the better you can market to them. By speaking to each individual customer, you can create messages that reinforce the brand relationship and drive long-term success.
If you don’t know something about your customers, just ask them. With consent and clear expectations around data, you can enable more successful campaigns while maintaining your customers’ trust.
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