The challenge
VWG captures millions of rows of data each day across more than 50 datasets covering all areas of the business from CRM, to sales, aftersales, and survey data, from both online and offline sources. Automotive purchase cycles are long (three years) and the pathway to purchase spans months (~120 days); customers interact with the brand dozens of times prior to purchase. The brand had toestablish which engagements were demonstrative of an interest to buy vs which were less committed interactions by consumers.
Without knowing the value of each engagement, VWG was struggling to determine which actions they should be influencing individuals to take.
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251%
increase in click-through-rate for audience selected using scoring
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767%
increase in conversion to online high value behaviour
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81%
increase in open rate for the campaign
-
2x
audience size for Audi’s Repurchase email campaign
-
-
251%
increase in click-through-rate for audience selected using scoring
-
767%
increase in conversion to online high value behaviour
-
81%
increase in open rate for the campaign
-
-
-
2x
audience size for Audi’s Repurchase email campaign
-
The approach
We built a custom Customer Engagement Score (CES) to place a value on every engagement an individual can have with VWG. The value of the engagement is anchored to key offline buying actions and vehicle sales, meaning the score is a representation of each consumer’s likelihood to purchase.
This daily-refreshed score is firstly summarised to an individual so VWG know exactly how engaged any given customer is on any given day. Next, the score was rolled up to a brand level, allowing each VWG brand to understand how many individuals were engaging with them at any point in time.
Last of all, the rolled-up score was placed into ‘bands’ of high, medium, or low so the business could easily identify and action on customers who are demonstrating high levels of engagement.
The outcome
Our work has allowed VWG to understand exactly how individuals are engaging with their brand at any point in time. Being able to track all engagements in a single metric gives an unparalleled view of the brand’s performance and demonstrates the wide impact that marketing efforts have in driving engagement. CES is now acting as an identification tool that allows our client to quickly prioritise the highest engaged customers for communications.
Audience selections for email campaigns have seen significant improvements in both the volume targeted and the performance of targeted activity, as the CES allows us to identify those who are engaging and thus ready for a ‘conversation’ with the brand.
For the first time, VWG can evaluate which customer engagements matter in generating a sale. Previously, website visits could not be associated to a vehicle order, so while VWG understood the importance of their websites they struggled to quantify the benefit they bring and which parts of the website bring the most value.
Our solution has provided fantastic visibility of exactly how brand engagement fluctuated as COVID restrictions changed.
