A Maccy D’s makeover
McDonalds emails were everything they weren’t meant to be. Bland, long and dated. I definitely wasn’t ‘Loving it’. A template had been created with good intentions. But it had been a straightjacket for the creative team. We had to break it and make it again.
I initiated a massive overhaul of our design process, with a mobile first, image-based approach. We injected a concept into every panel, using clever personalisation and contextualisation and building a narrative for every email, from the subject line to the content and the call to action.
I shifted the focus back on the food, scrapping ingredient lists for juicy burger shots. It was out with paragraphs, in with shorter, bitesize copy that was on brand and in tune with the above the line campaign.
It was a huge change, with huge challenges. Our process became more creative led, but at times created a headache for the dev team. So I implemented team meetings at early concept stage so that developers could give us technical feedback and have longer to find a way to make it work. We created technical pointers for creatives so that they let their imagination run wild without driving the dev team mad.
The result? Open and click through rates shot up and we impressed our client by taking the initiative to push ourselves on. The big above the line agencies started treating us more as creative partners than simply the crm folk.