About ANWB
Established in 1883 and with 4 million members, ANWB is the largest membership organization in the Netherlands. The organization offers numerous products and services for both members and non-members in the categories of mobility, finance, publishing, and travel. It also issues ANWB travel guides, maps, and magazines. ANWB employs approximately 4,800 staff members and runs 77 retail shops.
ANWB is well-represented online. The site www.anwb.nl, attracts about 120 million annual visitors, was 2013 Website of the Year in the ‘Weather and Traffic’ category. ANWB also has 23 apps that, to date, have been downloaded more than 3.5 million times.
Challenges
ANWB is an established and respected resource in the Dutch market; almost every Dutch traveler knows where to find the ANWB. But this doesn’t mean that ANWB marketers can sit back and relax. They continuously face a huge challenge in retaining and providing optimal service to their members. What is the best way to achieve this?
According to ANWB, the answer lies in placing member needs at the heart of their marketing. Customer satisfaction and loyalty can be increased by closely matching visitor segments to their online experience across channels.
That is why ANWB started to look for software that could help make their online communications more relevant. Also, ANWB gives privacy a high priority. Maintaining user privacy was a critical requirement. BlueConic satisfies these requirements.
BlueConic can analyze online visitor behavior without compromising users’ identity. This enables ANWB to make their online channels personally relevant without using personally identifiable information.
Solutions
ANWB used BlueConic to make the website more relevant for anonymous, individual visitors. The software analyzed visitor behavior on www.anwb.nl and recorded their interests and preferences. For example: the countries and activities in which they were interested were registered (such as camping in France or skiing in Austria). Based on this information, ANWB, which had developed various cross-sell and upsell campaigns, offered the most suitable products and services in real time.
For example, one of the campaigns focused on members who were already subscribers to Dutch roadside assistance, but who might benefit from European coverage. This campaign was initiated for people who qualified based on their online behavior. Someone who read information about winter sports in France, for example, was assumed to be interested in roadside assistance on the European roads. This person would see a personalized offer with an image of a car in a winter landscape in France, accompanied by the caption ‘Roadside assistance for winter travel’.
However, this approach had its disadvantages. Based on online behavior you could presume that someone would be interested in a certain cross-sell or upsell offer, but you don’t know that for certain. ANWB’s visitors are almost always anonymous, making it unclear whether they are a member, and if they are, which products and services they might purchase.
The lack of certainty is what drove ANWB to improve their approach with BlueConic. From that point on data that was derived from online behavior was verified with insights from the customer’s account. This could be accessed if a visitor logged onto the customer portal on www.anwb.nl. From that moment - irrespective of whether a member logged in again or not during a subsequent visit - the products and services they purchased were known. His or her privacy was not compromised because only data that was not traceable to the individual was stored.
This way, ANWB was able to combine the assumptions that were derived from online behavior with data from the customer portal. This enabled ANWB to make its communications more relevant, ensuring, for instance, that Europe Coverage was not offered to members who already had this coverage and that offers were displayed only if they supplemented the visitor’s current membership.
Results
Through personalized cross-sell and upsell campaigns, ANWB has been able to increase its conversion rates by 8x. The average conversion rate was stuck at 4% but with BlueConic it now increased to more than 30%. The upsell campaign focusing on members who subscribed to Dutch roadside assistance led to a significant increase in sales of additional European coverage.
The careful selection of cross-sell and upsell campaigns thus brings a tremendous pay-off, especially considering that ANWB didn’t discount its products in any way. Its conversion growth was realized purely by offering relevant promotions based on anonymous customer data.
This success has urged ANWB to expand the number of cross sell and upsell campaigns even further. Besides roadside assistance, the association will also be offering trips, credit cards and insurance via these campaigns. What’s more, ANWB will be using BlueConic for more channels than just the website. This multi-channel leap is possible because BlueConic is technology agnostic, allowing it to cooperate with all kinds of platforms and systems.
