Subway had just rebranded and was pivoting to become a best-in-class digital organization — customer experience, mobile, loyalty, all of it. As an extension of the new Subway Digital team, we were brought in to build the digital assets behind a CRM strategy Accenture Interactive had already built, aimed at existing customers, loyal ones, and people who'd never ordered through the app.
The centerpiece was MyWay Rewards, launching across 28,500 restaurants in North America. The pitch to guests: personalization, flexibility, a few surprises along the way. Our job was getting people to sign up, then giving them a reason to keep coming back.
There was a wrinkle. Subway had just gone through a brand refresh with another agency, and the new color system wasn't translating to digital. The incumbent was letting it slide. That gap became our opening.
We led with the CRM work first — DTC emails built in Adobe Campaign Manager, each one with a single job: introduce the program, drive enrollment, or pull someone back in for their next reward. The creative leaned into a "new" Subway — fun, fresh, connected to what was happening in and out of the store — built on Accenture Interactive's customer data and the brand's new visual identity. Adobe Campaign and Adobe Target handled the targeting and personalization underneath it, so the tone stayed playful while the mechanics stayed sharp.
While we were building those out, we took the brand-to-digital color compliance problem off the client's plate. Nobody asked us to. We just did it.
The CRM program ran for years, and it worked the way a loyalty program is supposed to: MyWay Rewards pulled in roughly 20,000 new members a day and grew digital orders to 35% of total order value, with personalized communications and mobile ordering becoming core to how people ordered.
That work earned the trust to pitch a full site redesign. The site pitch didn't unseat the incumbent — we didn't win that one. But it mattered more than winning would have: it was strong enough to become part of the story that led to our acquisition by Accenture.
Loyalty programs live or die on whether the first email actually gets opened. Ours did, then it kept getting opened long enough to become a business.
