Since 1905, The AA has been on the side of UK drivers and today it remains the UK’s largest motoring organization with over 14 million members. As well as being the market leader in roadside assistance, The AA also offers a wide range of driving products and services across drivers’ lives from driving lessons to insurance to accident management to car servicing and mobile mechanics to buying and selling cars online. It’s OK, when you’re with The AA.
Story Behind the Brand
100
%
increase in direct marketing road acquisition revenue since implementing Bloomreach Engagement
146
%
increase in direct marketing road acquisition sales since implementing Bloomreach Engagement
Challenge
With a previous marketing vendor, The AA faced significant challenges in achieving its ambitious campaign goals related to new customer acquisition.
Running campaigns to acquire new customers for its award-winning breakdown service, The AA team focused on a combination of prospecting, winning back former customers, and cross-selling to existing product holders. However, its existing marketing tools presented limitations, including slow data processing times, lengthy campaign execution, and an inability to easily test and optimize multi-channel strategies.
The team needed much better speed-to-market time and needed the ability to test the omnichannel impact of campaigns on the customers being acquired.
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Solution
The AA made the strategic decision to migrate to Bloomreach Engagement to address its customer communication challenges. This transition wasn’t just about adopting a new platform; it was about fundamentally reshaping marketing operations with a focus on agility, data-driven decisions, and customer-centric strategies.
With next-day data latency, the team can now make faster, more informed decisions, staying agile and responsive to customer behavior. Lightning-fast campaign run times have eliminated delays, allowing marketing messages to be delivered quickly to seize timely opportunities.
Bloomreach also simplified The AA’s omnichannel marketing, enabling The AA to test and optimize campaigns more efficiently while maintaining consistency across touchpoints.
Automated reporting dashboards provide real-time insights, ensuring strategies are always backed by clear, actionable data. Tools like integrated deliverability insights and a new contact policy framework have enhanced creative management and ensured communications are timely, relevant, and engaging.
Additionally, intuitive customer visualization tools now give The AA a deeper understanding of customer journeys, allowing for more personalized and impactful campaigns. These innovations have led to a new strategic approach, laying a strong foundation for future growth and profitability.
Partnering with Bloomreach has been a game-changer for us. We have already accomplished so much, but we know we’re only just scratching the surface. The potential is huge, and we’re thrilled to expand into areas like next best action decisioning, digital personalization, and predictive modeling. It is a very exciting time for us.
Alasdair Wheeler
Head of CRM Data and Delivery, The AA
Results
The results of The AA’s migration to Bloomreach Engagement have showcased significant improvements across multiple key performance metrics.
Direct marketing road acquisition sales made are up 146% while revenue from direct marketing road acquisition sales has doubled. The company has also seen significantly more engagement in its monthly email newsletters. Open rates on both road and insurance communications have increased by an average of 11 percentage points.
The AA team is also saving time as campaigns now run faster, insights are generated in real time and multi-channel strategies are significantly simpler to test and refine for future optimization.
Partnering with Merkle was another key factor in The AA achieving these impressive results. Merkle is a global leader in customer experience management and a strategic partner of Bloomreach.
Merkle played a pivotal role in transforming The AA’s marketing operations by leading discovery sessions for vendor selections and ensuring that the ongoing implementation and rollout were fit for purpose and scalable to AA’s evolving growth. The result was an activated Bloomreach platform that delivered transformative insights and dramatically slashed data latency.
With plans to explore advanced personalization, predictive modeling, and next-best-action decisioning in the immediate future, The AA’s marketing team is poised to continue achieving exceptional results.
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