A major U.S. quick-service restaurant (QSR) chain faced an engagement challenge: Substantial marketing spend was producing limited results. The culprit? Generic targeting. The company turned to AI-driven personalization to reshape its customer engagement strategy at a fundamental level.

By leveraging targeted, personalized offers, the company was able to convert previously disengaged customers into active repeat visitors, significantly boosting sales and customer loyalty.

The company leveraged Personalize.AITM by ZS (P.AI) to achieve over $100 million in incremental revenue, a more than 6% revenue lift and a robust 4x return on its marketing investments.

The challenge: Identifying optimal offers to target customer behaviors

The client, a well-known QSR brand in the U.S. with a broad national footprint, faced an engagement challenge despite significant marketing investments. It annually invests over $50 million in marketing. Despite substantial spending, traditional campaigns lacked strategic personalization, resulting in ineffective targeting, inefficient spending and modest customer engagement. With over 100 campaigns run annually, the client urgently needed to identify the optimal offer types, value propositions and product recommendations tailored precisely to each customer’s unique preferences and behaviors.

The solution: Real-time experimentation and agile iteration

P.AI is an advanced AI-powered platform built on predictive machine learning models, real-time experimentation and agile iteration. Unlike static personalization solutions, P.AI dynamically assigned each customer to contextually relevant journeys, such as churn prevention, upselling and cross-selling, that are informed by robust historical and real-time customer data.

What set P.AI apart was its multivariate testing capability, evaluating offer types, messaging tone, product selection, creative design and pricing variations. This granular, customer-centric approach ensured optimal marketing spend.

The impact: Multimillion dollar revenue lifts and customers that come back

The initiative profoundly affected both the bottom line and strategic positioning of the QSR brand, producing more than a $4 ROI for every dollar spent on marketing, a 70% increase in net revenue per targeted customer and more than $100 million in incremental revenue lifetime to date. In addition to the quantifiable outcomes, the program delivered benefits such as deeper customer engagement, better long-term customer retention and established a significant competitive advantage by aligning products and messaging precisely to customer preference