email

How Wendy's Turned Its Digital Program From Broadcast to One-to-One Marketing

As a franchise-owned restaurant, Wendy's has historically focused on broadcast marketing, so it was a huge undertaking to build its first digital program in 2011, explained Michelle J. Richard, Digital CRM Marketing Specialist at The Wendy's Company, in a case study at the Email Insider Summit today.

At the beginning, the QSR focused its digital strategy on mass marketing. They launched Wendy Mail as "a bit of an afterthought," but still managed to collect 700,000 email addresses. But the emails were a bit batch and blast. "It was the way to get started on the path to understand what customers were doing to get to the register, but we had no real understanding of customer data," explained Richard in her presentation. In 2012, the company only sent about 10 emails total and this siloed program didn't tie to any other digital assets. 

However, in 2013, the fast food chain redefined its objectives to speak to customers on a one-to-one basis in order to be more relevant. So they set out on a mission and did a lot of testing. Wendy's dedicated its marketing to understanding subscriber interactions and behaviors in order to send segmented emails based on behavior. The goal was to get users to the site to understand the products and get them to interact with the brand. They tested colors, call-to-action buttons and timing, among other things.

advertisement

advertisement

The firm built a solid CRM strategy based on this research and began segmenting based on customer behavior. Nowadays the company sends about 3-5 targeted emails per week depending on a subscriber's relationship with brand. And this volume isn't hurting interactions. In fact, the company reports an average of 40 percent open rates, "which is crazy because we don't have an e-commerce site," said Richard.

The database has organically grown to 2.5 million customers.

Now Wendy's is adding in more cross platform consumer data to increase its targeting. They are beginning to factor not only email interactions, but what consumers are doing on the site, mobile and social. "People like to share a lot of information in social media, and I am more than happy to take that information to target," said Richard. 

The QSR is taking the data from its email system and letting it touch other data so that it feeds into an ecosystem for one-to-one targeting. Wendy's is focused on "giving the right message to the right person at the right time all using data," said Richard, pointing out the difference between salad eaters and cheeseburger lovers. 

Next year, the company plans to bring mobile pay data into the mix and set more real time goals. 

Next story loading loading..