A valuable partnership — with a
leaky funnel.
RBI had an ongoing partnership with T-Mobile called T-Mobile Tuesdays. Every week, T-Mobile subscribers received a promo code redeemable at Burger King or Popeyes. The concept was solid. The execution had a serious problem.
When we looked at the conversion funnel, we were losing guests at the promo code step at an alarming rate. Guests were grabbing codes but not redeeming them. Average conversion per promotion was under 3%. For a national promotion running weekly, that was a significant amount of revenue left on the table — and a lot of frustrated guests.
"Guests needed to grab a code, validate it via a Braze webhook pop-up, find the exact eligible product, add it to their cart, and then check out. Five distinct cognitive steps — none of which felt connected to each other."
The system at the time used a Braze webhook to validate codes. The only entry point was a content card on the app's homepage that triggered a pop-up. Once validated, guests still had to independently find the correct product and add it to their cart. It was an anti-pattern — a flow designed around the system's architecture, not around how guests actually behave.
The right fix — without building
a new service from scratch.
The timing was tight. Popeyes was relaunching its Chicken Sandwich through a limited promotion, and the team wanted promo codes to be part of it. Someone suggested building a net-new promo codes service. I shut that down immediately.
We couldn't build, test, and ship an entirely new service in time. Our team was lean — especially in QA — and introducing a new service with no track record into a high-visibility promotion was a risk we weren't willing to take.
Instead, we reframed the problem: rather than building something new, could we make the existing offer system do the work? That question led to the hypothesis that drove everything.
"We believe that by building promo codes into our existing offer feature, we will reduce friction and improve the guest experience — resulting in a 5% Popeyes increase and a 2% Burger King increase in promo code checkout conversion, and reduced support complaints."
The insight was simple: promo codes could function as locks on offers. Instead of a separate validation flow, a locked offer would prompt guests to enter their code directly — no jumping between pages, no hunting for the right product. The T-Mobile offer would be pinned to the top of the offer list. Guests would find it, unlock it with their code, and the eligible product would be right there.
Eight steps down to six —
and dramatically less confusion.
We built the frontend and integrated it with our existing vendor for code validation — no new service, no new infrastructure risk. The architecture decision freed the team to focus entirely on the guest experience.
The before and after tells the story clearly.
Pinning the T-Mobile offer to the top of the offer list was a small decision with outsized impact — guests no longer had to know where to look. The code entry was in context, inline with the offer itself. And once validated, the product was already there. No hunting, no confusion, no drop-off.
The shared platform codebase meant the same solution worked for both Popeyes and Burger King — one build, two brands benefiting immediately.
Record-breaking redemptions —
and a new revenue mechanism.
The results blew past our targets. We hypothesized a 5% conversion improvement. We delivered nearly triple that. More importantly, the approach validated a new promotion mechanic that Popeyes and Burger King could use going forward.
The most telling signal wasn't the conversion number — it was what happened next. Promo code promotions went on to break redemption and revenue records with each subsequent release. We didn't just fix a broken flow. We built a repeatable, high-performing promotion mechanic that the business could deploy at will.