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Six months of Starbucks emails later, I finally cracked the CRM and personalization strategy behind every email send.
I don’t drink Starbucks every day, but I have been a Starbucks Rewards member for years. The program is essentially the poster child for loyalty programs around the world. As marketers, we often reference these giant enterprise brands, but very few of us actually get to look behind the curtain at the personalization system behind the program.
So I went deep — spending 40+ hours gathering and analyzing every email Starbucks sent me from January to June 2025, and broke it all down in the Figma board below. Truthfully, this is one of the smartest and most advanced lifecycle programs I’ve ever seen. I dove into everything from the strategy and the calendar to the actual emails themselves — and now you can see for yourself how it works.
There’s so much to unpack in the Figma board, but if you don’t have time to dive in, I’ve shared the most interesting bits below:
🤔 Why is email so important?
In Q1 of 2025, Starbucks reported around 34.5M active loyalty members. It’s estimated that these members account for 41% of all sales — and that they spend nearly three times more than non-members. They show up in the real world, too: It’s been reported that 71% of app users visit a store in person, weekly.
With a hypothetical, average order value of $6, that’s roughly $7.6B in revenue per year from members.
Just a 5% increase in incremental orders could translate to $382M in additional revenue for Starbucks — and that’s not even counting the lift from other channels like SMS or push. (For context, Starbucks' 2024 fiscal year ended with $34B in revenue.)
💡Key takeaways
Clear themes
- There are five core email categories: brand engagement, product spotlights, promotional, seasonal, and cause-based
- Every email reinforces and trains users to interact with the product ecosystem (ordering, customizing drinks, redeeming stars) to build behavioral loops and habits.
Strategic timing and calendar
- The calendar and send cadence is built around seasonal and evergreen campaigns, which allows Starbucks to send 2-3 emails per week without being repetitive while also reinforcing engagement, discovery, and transactions.
- 80% of emails are sent between 5–9 AM, aligning perfectly with morning coffee routines.
Streamlined creative
- Most emails are built around the same core templates, which allows the brand to easily scale to multiple sends per week. This is ideal for a national brand with regional reach.
- They keep subject lines short and mobile-optimized while using the full real estate of preview text to layer in emotional or product context.
⚙️ The personalization system
What makes Starbucks’ email program so powerful isn’t just that it feels personal — it’s the sheer volume and consistency of decisioning happening behind the scenes. For every send, they’re making choices around which product or flavor to feature, what offer to include, what creative to use, which channel to activate, and when to deliver. How do they make those decisions? It’s all likely influenced by key signals: think order history, product affinities, star balance, visit cadence, region, and broader trends across the loyalty base.
Multiply that by tens of millions of customers — likely dozens of overlapping initiatives, hundreds of modular content assets, and thousands of potential experience combinations — and you begin to see the strategy: personalization by intelligent orchestration. Every email reflects a chain of decisions made to deliver the most contextually relevant experience to each individual, shaped by both their behavior and the brand’s accumulated knowledge over time.
🔎 An accidental look at experimentation
I’m still not fully sure how this happened, but I got an accidental look into their experimentation because I seem to have two emails associated with the loyalty program. They're running some highly advanced and isolated experimentation to test different creatives and CTAs. In this case, they made a slightly modified version of the exact same email for loyalty members and non-members, which allows them to isolate exactly what variables are impacting performance across audiences and individuals.
For this example, they kept everything the same, but used a completely different header image and CTA for both audiences.
Fun fact: According to GPT, Starbucks costs roughly four to ten times more than brewing a cup at home. If you drink a coffee daily, that’s roughly $900 to $1,600 per year. That being said, I like my coffee, and a cup at home does not taste like a cup of Starbucks, no matter how hard I try to recreate the peppermint mocha.
