VR is a government-owned railway company in Finland. It operates the country’s passenger rail services with over 800 commuter rail services per day. It is one of the most significant operators in the Finnish public transport market as it has approximately 9,000 employees and has been providing transport services since 1862.
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VR’s Success With Email Marketing and Bloomreach Engagement Helps Optimize the Customer Experience
Story Behind the Brand
20
%
increase in email open rate
30
%
increase in revenue per customer who receives email communications
Challenge
Because of its business model and market position, VR is in a unique position.
VR is the only major company in Finland that offers passenger train service — with both short-haul and long-haul journeys — on a daily basis. That means the company can focus its attention and budget on optimizing the customer experience. With private cars and other means of transport serving as its main competitors, VR focuses on activating its customers and giving them the best possible experience on their rides.
Roughly 90% of train tickets sold are bought in self-service channels, many of which are digital. This number made VR want to begin working in a more data-driven manner to better serve customers digitally, as well as use personalization to offer limitless ecommerce experiences and keep its brand top of mind.
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Solution
Bloomreach Engagement has proven to be an extremely effective solution for VR as it optimizes its customers’ experience.
Now, instead of sending a generic message to its entire customer base, the company can send personalized email campaigns to segmented groups of customers that deliver a relevant message and inspire action. This contributes to VR’s growth by personalizing communications that encourage customers to travel more often or add on to their travel experiences.
With Bloomreach Engagement, employees with a less technical background are able to utilize collected customer data to generate these personalized email campaigns. An IT or data team is not needed to make the customer data useful in real time.
This lets marketers easily form target groups or evaluate data in different customer segments to evaluate what types of communications should be sent to which customers and on which channel. This has greatly increased efficiency for VR since replacing its legacy email system, and has driven fantastic results as well.
We wanted to start working in a much more data-driven way with our customer communications and marketing. Once we started looking for a platform that could help with this, we found that Bloomreach could cover our needs. It is a very versatile platform that is providing us with a lot of opportunities.
Ilona Pirhonen
Head of Digital Sales and Customer Engagement, VR
Results
VR has seen measurable uplift since implementing Bloomreach Engagement. This includes a 20% increase in email open rate and a 30% increase in revenue among customers who receive email marketing communications.
The positive results help push VR to achieving its long-term goals of improving customer engagement and customer lifetime value. The company’s aim is to use Loomi — Bloomreach’s AI for ecommerce — to have omnichannel scenarios running that encompass the entire customer journey to optimally serve its customer base.
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