Campaign: Monopoly at McDonald’s
Client: McDonald’s
Agency: The Marketing Store
To build anticipation and awareness for its traditional October “Monopoly at McDonald’s” game promotion, the company and its agency The Marketing Store opted for a two-phased e-mail campaign. A “pre-promotion” e-mail went out to consumers who had volunteered their addresses in previous years of the campaign, giving them a game code that they could use on the first day. That initial contact also promised that the game would be handing out a guaranteed $100,000 prize on day one, thereby eliminating the lag time that usually accompanies traffic buildup in a contest promotion. (Read more about the award-winning mobile campaign linked to “Monopoly at McDonald’s” here.)
After the game had launched, customers who opted in received weekly Tuesday e-mail contacts each of the four weeks of the campaign, as a tool for stimulating repeat play. New opt-ins were included as they came in, requiring that McDonald’s house list be updated on the fly.
The pre-launch messaging got an average 12% clickthrough and resulted in more than 500,000 pre-registrations, an increase of 145% from the 2007 game. Sixty-four percent of customers who received a game code in those pre-game communications went on to apply the code to their game account.
Over the life of the campaign the e-mail portion earned more than 1 million clicks on more than 10 million e-mails sent. That 10% clickthrough rate lasted for the month, showing that McDonald’s and its agency successfully fought message fatigue.
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