How McDonald’s scaled loyalty to 3 markets in 5 months

McDonald’s Mesoamérica is the Central American heart of the Golden Arches, serving up Big Macs and innovation across Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. What started with one restaurant in Guatemala in 1974 officially became a regional franchise powerhouse in 2006. Since then, they've grown to 130+ restaurants, launched world-firsts like McDelivery and the Happy Meal, and built a culture rooted in community, quality, and a friendly smile, earning multiple global recognitions from McDonald’s Corporation.

• Launching localized loyalty programs across markets with different currencies, rules, and, later on, segmentation strategies.
• Avoiding margin impact from overly broad discounts while keeping offers relevant and valuable.
• Consolidating fragmented loyalty tracking and reducing dependency on manual ops and custom tooling.

Across global markets, McDonald’s is mastering the art of strategic promotions – balancing value-hungry customers with the need to protect margins.

Corporate had the playbook: smart value deals to boost basket size, headline-worthy launches to drive traffic, and loyalty as the engine behind it all ($30Bn in loyalty sales and climbing). McDonald’s Mesoamérica was ready to run with it but needed the right tools. 

To bring that to life locally, they needed a loyalty platform that played well with their stack, handled country-specific logic, and let regional teams move fast. That’s where Voucherify came in.

Migration & rollout

​​McDonald’s Mesoamérica rolled out its Voucherify-powered loyalty program across three countries in under five months. Starting with data migration, followed by test launches, and then full-scale go-lives. 

Guatemala kicked things off with customer data import, quickly followed by Nicaragua and Honduras. After sandbox testing and fine-tuning, Nicaragua soft-launched first and went fully live a week later. Honduras and Guatemala followed on a similar rhythm, each moving from test to production in a tight, iterative loop. The phased approach gave teams room to learn fast, adapt locally, and launch with confidence across the region.

Building loyalty across markets

Rolling out a single loyalty program across multiple countries is one thing. Rolling it out while tailoring every piece, metadata, rewards, customer segmentation, and integrations, is another. McDonald’s Mesoamérica didn’t just replicate a template; they set out to build region-specific loyalty engines under one unified platform.

Honduras

With nearly 200,000 customers, Honduras is focused on fraud prevention setup and real-time personalization. The loyalty logic is set to power 50+ rewards, with order data enriched by detailed metadata for source and channel.

Nicaragua

Nicaragua, with 320,000+ customers, intends to mirror the structure of Honduras but fine-tuned for simplicity. The focus here is on onboarding new customers quickly, using defined earning rules and 10+ reward types. Order tracking will remain robust, with the same granular metadata setup as Honduras.

Guatemala

As the largest market with 2.8 million customers (1 in 6 Guatemalans enrolled in the program!), Guatemala plans to run the most mature infrastructure. Here customer profiles may be enriched with real-time data flowing from mParticle, with segmentation strategy targeting low-activity and first-time users. The loyalty setup includes 10+ rewards and multiple earning rules. Beyond rich metadata and iOS channel tracking, Guatemala also has a dedicated QA/UAT environment, making it the technical blueprint for the region’s other rollouts.

For now, all markets follow the same logic for loyalty – earn-and-burn logic with free menu items as rewards. However, with Voucherify’s flexible architecture, McDonald’s Mesoamérica is now able to orchestrate localized programs on a single platform, one that adapts to data maturity, customer behaviors, and operational priorities at country level.

Customer Experience

McDonald’s Guatemala set out to build a loyalty program that works where their customers are – on the app, at the counter, in the drive-thru, and at self-service kiosks. The goal was straightforward: reward customers for every eligible purchase with points they could redeem for menu items like a hash brown (165 points) or a double cheeseburger (310 points). Every customer gets a welcome bonus on their first order, and points are automatically earned with every transaction.

At checkout, customers present a scannable code; the restaurant’s in-house system pings Voucherify to validate and apply the reward, and the sale is processed normally. Behind the scenes, Voucherify APIs handle the full loyalty flow: enrolling customers, logging orders, tracking redemptions, validating coupons, and maintaining real-time balances. 

Voucherify APIs power key loyalty flows:

• Enrolling customers
• Tracking orders
• Reward redemption
• Coupon validation and redemption
• Loyalty balance and transaction history queries

Tracking

McDonald’s Mesoamérica set out to measure loyalty performance with precision and Voucherify made it possible. The team wanted to go beyond surface-level metrics and get granular, segmentable, and monthly-tracked insights to guide strategy and governance.

They focused on core KPIs like:

• Frequency of purchases (by customer, per month).
• Average order size (per customer or all users, month-by-month).
• Customer lifetime value.
• Monthly point balances (total points held across all customers at month-end).

On top of that, they needed segmentation-ready filtering across multiple attributes:

• Restaurant locations.
• Business areas.
• User tiers (new, average, high-frequency).
• Campaign types (e.g., bonus events).

They also tracked program-specific metrics, such as:

• Unique loyalty customer counts.
• Monthly point accrual vs. redemption.
• Redemption behavior per earning rule (including bonus-specific rules).
• Passive points liability (unused, non-expired balances).
• Monthly sales totals from loyalty participants across all channels.

Voucherify’s API-first structure and loyalty transaction history gave them the visibility and filtering power to track these KPIs reliably and customize views per market or segment.