Serving innovation with every order.
Subway enhances customer experiences with dynamic content, personalisation and real-time offers.
25% growth
in MVP Rewards membership
Objectives
Re-launch MVP Rewards programme with personalised, real-time offers to drive engagement
Increase loyalty membership through customised communications
Ensure consistent platform performance to support real-time offers at scale
Results
Over one million real-time personalised offers accepted by Subway guests shortly after relaunch.
25% growth in MVP Rewards membership driven by personalised communications since the relaunch
Powered millions of offers every month through 99.9% uptime
Personalised service for a digital age
For Subway®, the future isn’t only about what’s on the menu — it’s also about creating seamless, engaging experiences for every guest.
“At Subway, we know how important it is that we’re delivering the best guest experience possible,” says Bryan Hooper, SVP of Digital and Consumer Technology, who joined the global restaurant brand in 2021. “In addition to our freshly made, high-quality options, it’s about making the entire experience personal, intuitive and as convenient as possible.”
As the global sandwich leader, Subway serves freshly made sandwiches at a great value to millions of guests around the world in nearly 37,000 restaurants every day. Through its digital transformation journey, the brand is stepping up to remain competitive in a fast-paced, ever-evolving industry — aligning its digital guest experience with the personalisation that defines its menu.
The Subway Digital Technology Team, led by Hooper, set out with an ambitious goal: to enhance consumer engagement across every touchpoint, from the loyalty programme to the mobile app and web experiences.
Now, the team is steering Subway toward a future where digital convenience meets personalised, omnichannel service. With Adobe Experience Cloud, Subway is redefining the customer journey — seamlessly integrating web, mobile and in-store interactions to create experiences that resonate more deeply with customers.
Evolving from one-size-fits-all to one-to-one personalisation
In 2023, the Digital Technology Team was tasked with relaunching Subway’s North American loyalty programme to expand membership and reach a younger, more tech-savvy audience while reimagining an almost 60-year-old brand.
Constrained by a broad, one-size-fits-all approach to customer engagement, Subway’s use of general marketing messages had become less effective. “We were sending out six emails a week that weren’t personal or specific,” Hooper says. To elevate the guest experience and meet modern consumer expectations, Subway needed a more sophisticated engagement strategy.
Enter Adobe Journey Optimizer, which played an integral role in transforming Subway’s guest journey and orchestrating customer engagement across digital channels. By leveraging real-time insights and AI decision-making, Subway is now able to deliver personalised interactions that resonate with each guest.
Journey Optimizer enabled Subway to relaunch its MVP Rewards loyalty programme, delivering real-time reward offers at an impressive scale. With 99.99% uptime, the reliable platform powers millions of monthly offers, including Subway cash rewards, QR promotions and wallet-based deals, transforming Subway's guest experience into a highly personalised digital journey.
One standout promotion used Journey Optimizer to analyse individual customer data and past purchases and enable instant, one-to-one offers. “We offered a free cookie each day, tailored to customers’ preferences, such as chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin — all managed in real time, which significantly boosted engagement,” Hooper explains. This resulted in over one million real-time personalised cookie offers accepted by Subway loyalty guests.
“We offered a free cookie each day, tailored to customers’ preferences — all managed in real time, which significantly boosted engagement.”
Bryan Hooper
Senior Vice President of Digital and Consumer Technology, Subway
Seamless digital integration
As Journey Optimizer helped deliver real-time, personalised offers to its guests, Subway used Adobe Campaign to unify customer data from various channels like email, the mobile app and the web into one actionable view. Together, these tools enabled Hooper and his team to drive growth across all channels by ensuring that each customer interaction was relevant and unique.
Since the integration of Journey Optimizer and Campaign, Subway has seen a 25% increase in MVP Rewards memberships. “We’ve been able to take this rich set of data that we've built up about guests on our platforms and really activate that into our marketing channels with personalised emails and push notifications in Adobe Campaign,” Hooper says.
Guests now receive communications based on their preferences, increasing their likelihood of engaging with the brand. If a guest is a vegetarian, for example, they won't receive an offer for a steak wrap or meatball sub.
The digital team continues to leverage Adobe Target to personalise and optimise the guest experience and identify the most effective content and promotions with A/B testing.
“We’ve been using Adobe Target to help us to come up with new ways to optimise conversion on our websites,” Hooper says. “The team proposes a hypothesis of what would improve conversion, tests it out, sees what happens and analyses the results. If it wins, then it stays; if it doesn’t, we try something new.”
Whether guests interact online, in the app or in a shop, they now receive messages that have been thoughtfully tested and tailored to enhance their experience, helping Subway connect with guests in a more meaningful way.
“We’ve been able to take this rich set of data that we've built up about guests on our platforms and really activate that into our marketing channels with personalised emails and push notifications in Adobe Campaign.”
Bryan Hooper
Senior Vice President of Digital and Consumer Technology, Subway
Global expansion with Ultimate Success
As Subway continues to prioritise personalised guest experiences in North America, the digital technology team is expanding their strategy globally. Among other customer engagement initiatives, Subway recently launched an updated mobile app for key markets in the UK and Europe, where loyalty offers are personalised and delivered digitally with ease. Throughout its transformation journey, both domestically and abroad, Subway has leaned on Adobe’s Ultimate Success team.
“We were able to launch our loyalty programme in North America and just weeks later roll out Adobe Journey Optimizer in Finland without missing a beat,” Hooper says. “Adobe Ultimate Success was critical in helping us launch new platforms globally. Every initial launch comes with challenges, but having Ultimate Success allowed us to address issues quickly and keep things running smoothly.”
The dedicated Adobe support team ensured Subway’s implementation of Journey Optimizer and other Adobe products was seamless and successful, even under the tight timelines driven by its ambitious global strategy.
“We don’t earn the right to try new things if we can’t consistently deliver a great, reliable, fast guest experience,” Hooper says. “Ultimate Success has been a key part of ensuring that and it’s one of the reasons we’ve been able to maintain such high uptime for our platforms.”
Building a smarter, more personalised future
Subway remains dedicated to advancing the customer experience by building on the digital foundation it established. Hooper admits that free cookies and vegetarian diet-conscious messaging might seem small, but “It's a way of showing our guests that we see them and we appreciate them.”
“It’s exciting to think about how we can continue using these new technologies to make the guest experience more intuitive and more personal while still delivering the fresh, fast service people love about Subway.”
With each innovation, Subway isn’t just keeping up with digital transformation — it’s redefining what a seamless, customer-first dining experience looks like.
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