AAA Northeast is one of the largest auto clubs in the world with over 6 million members. However, many people don’t know that they offer far more value to their members than roadside assistance.
Their Innovation and Strategy team saw a huge opportunity to personalize communications in order to engage their members around all the benefits and programs they offer. After just a few microexperiences, they have already achieved incredible success – including generating thousands of new sales opportunities and increasing email open rates over 10x.
“We believe in zero-party data, and we want to implement across the funnel, build a preference center, and create experiences to find data that is important,” says Randy Delgado, SVP of Innovation and Strategy at AAA Northeast.
What You May Not Know About AAA
AAA Northeast is one of the largest providers of auto club membership services in the United States, with 6.2 million members in 6 states. It offers roadside assistance that everyone is probably familiar with, but they also have many other valuable benefits and programs for members. Members can get travel and entertainment discount programs, insurance, loans, advice, and much more.
The Challenge: Usage & Customer Loyalty
AAA Northeast is a membership association, which means they have to be a brand that is well known for being reliable and trusted so that people will continue to renew. This is why that have added so many products and services on top of their staple service of roadside assistance.
However, the challenge for them has always been in helping customers find and take advantage of all of these programs. In the past, informing customers relied on in-person interactions, mail, and advertising. However, the Innovation and Strategy team had a hypothesis that this could scale much faster if personalization was implemented across all digital spaces. They started working with Wyng in January of 2022, and they already have learned a ton about their customers and achieved incredible results.
This is how we were able to target these specific users later down the road when they were ready for engagement with our brand again – at just the right time!
The Solution: Post-Purchase Questionnaire
When a AAA Northeast customer renews their membership or joins as a new member, they get a one-question survey that pops up immediately after they pay. The survey asks what types of benefits a customer is looking for or what problems they are solving. They are simple questions with clear value for the customer – if you tell us what you need, we’ll send you information about it.
A click rate of 16% shows that this is great timing for engagement—customers are more willing to fill out a survey when they’ve just finished a positive purchasing experience. Just as importantly, it had no negative impact on engagement or customer sentiment, so customers were willing to give this data and saw it as mostly a benefit to them.
The Results: More Engagement
AAA Northeast is a great example of how to create an innovative and engaging experience. It’s a smart and clean design that makes it easy for users to understand their offerings. The concise options make it easy for customers to find what they need, while the preference data enables AAA Northeast to provide them with relevant content. In addition, their impact on customer engagement has been amazing! Finally, one of the key principles of privacy-first personalization is exchanging value for zero-party data – so here the customer immediately receives relevant coupons or content in exchange for answering.
“We saw a remarkable increase in open rate, and even beyond that – to lead completion rate – to generate new opportunities.” – Randy Delgado, SVP of Innovation and Strategy.
So far, email engagement has improved with new segments and targeting driven by this zero-party data. Beyond that, the customers saw a benefit in terms of getting more relevant, personalized communication from AAA. This made them more willing to open emails and engage in conversations around other products.
