About Vanarama
Vanarama is a UK-based personal and commercial vehicle leasing ecommerce company currently undergoing a digital transformation to deliver further value to customers. Vanarama has won five UKCXA Gold awards for CX in 2020 and seven Golds in 2021. Vanarama is also a National League Sponsor and a Sunday Times Top 100 employer for the third year in a row.
Challenges
Given the significance and long-term nature of a vehicle lease, Vanarama’s B2B and B2C customers undergo purchase and renewal cycles that last several years. Web cookies don’t last that long, and buyers are likely using both offline and online touchpoints throughout their journey. As a result, Vanarama’s customer data resides in various platforms across its ecosystem. It was difficult to identify which customers were in-market – and for what type of vehicle or service. To fill these gaps and identify intent, Vanarama invested in third-party data, yet still couldn’t understand where individuals were in a purchase journey.
Solutions
Unified Profiles for Customer Insight
Foundational to gaining insight and orchestrating customer journeys, Vanarama needed to unify data from across systems and sources to understand their current data landscape and identify any potential gaps.
They began to build out their first-party data asset using unified profiles and associated identity resolution techniques, such as profile merging and cleaning profiles via AI Workbench. They reconciled data from across their ecosystem, including their CRM tools and internal data repositories, and used Timeline events to capture transactional data. Vanarama outlined the ideal data points necessary for their multi-dimensional segments including intent data, transactional data, and filled in any missing signals using the data collection feature Listeners to capture real-time data into individual-level profiles.
Previously, Vanarama defined in-market segments using a limited set of data points based on third-party data availability.
Now, Vanarama gains deeper insights into cross-channel customer behavior which they can use to present different customer lifecycle scenarios in real-time.
For example, purchase intent is now a tangible input to marketing. Vanarama isn’t just using the fact that a customer has interacted with several purchase options; they’re looking at various omnichannel engagement elements that could influence a journey.
We are starting to develop a deeper understanding of our users’ behaviors and journeys – in real time. There is an extra layer of interest and intent that we can derive from multi-channel touchpoints and these softer inputs have become more important for our marketing."
Head of Acquisition, VanaramaMulti-Channel Customer Journeys
As a company which prides itself on customer experience – and which has won multiple CX awards in recent years – Vanarama can activate advanced personalization techniques based on unified data and purpose-built segments. Moving from single-channel marketing optimizations to multi-channel ones depends on BlueConic’s Connections, Segmentation, and a way to easily scale personalized interactions.
Using Lifecycles, Vanarama can not only identify when customers are showing true intent to purchase but can orchestrate a lifecycle that pushes segments in real-time through purchase funnel and action. Kalpokaite says, “A BlueConic Lifecycle is not just a visualization, it’s a tangible, actionable customer journey map. It not only allows us to drive insights, but to activate coordinated multi-channel marketing.”
Gaining Operational Efficiencies & Differentiation
Kalpokaite also noted how access to first-party insights have changed Vanarama’s internal marketing processes. Centralized data allows Vanarama’s channel specialists to collaborate more effectively as they have access to the same insights. And not only that, but marketers who haven’t previously gotten the chance to work with unified data before are gaining new skills through their experiences at Vanarama.
BlueConic has changed not just how we market, but how we work and collaborate internally."
Head of Acquisition, VanaramaFurthermore, partnership with the BlueConic experts means Vanarama is asking new questions and thinking through new problems. Kalpokaite explained: “Before, we asked ‘How can we do this the same way we’ve done it before?’ Now, we start with a question and work backwards with BlueConic into how we can bring it to life, activate it, visualize it, or gain insights into it.”
Results
With greater knowledge, Vanarama can orchestrate customer journeys more effectively. As a test of the new segmentation, the company focused on targeting first-party purchase intent segments and compared the results with similar third-party audiences. Granular intent segments, built using omnichannel data via BlueConic delivered an 85% higher conversion rate.
Additionally, Vanarama has improved return on ad spend (ROAS) through its reduction in third-party data spending. Since taking control of its first-party data with BlueConic, Vanarama has been able to reduce purchasing external data for marketing and advertising campaigns.
To future proof themselves from future privacy regulations, shifting consumer demands, and potential market factors out of their control, Vanarama chose technology that will continue to drive results. Vanarama knows its use cases will continue to adapt over time and chose BlueConic as a platform that can scale with the company’s needs. “The incremental use cases follow the first one,” said Kalpokaite.
