How Starbucks powers personalization for 34.5M loyalty members

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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. And 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.