With 6.1 million members across the country, CAA is much more than an automobile club these days.
In fact, the CAA brand covers four different businesses—roadside assistance, travel, insurance and loyalty.
So when it came time to pour all these business lines and the CAA’s disparate transactions into a data system, the task was a big one.
Jeff Walker, the CAA’s chief strategy officer, told Marketing the big breakthrough came two years ago, when the CAA began working with one of its travel partners that was seeking guidance on its database of about 25,000 customers.
“We did some modeling—we took their database and overlaid it with ours, and then identified people on segments using Environics’ tools. Then we said ‘Look, here are another 400,000 households that are just like your core customers. Let’s develop a campaign and target them. Let’s start to generate some sales.’”
Walker said the email campaign’s hit rates, click-throughs and finally, the total sales, increased four-fold over previous campaigns.
“I think that helped catalyze people throughout our organization.”
Nowadays, working with member businesses and using CAA’s massive database has become a big part of the daily discussion for the century-old organization.
“As we all know well, doing ‘spray and pray’ marketing is not all that effective, and often, it doesn’t engender the kind of relationship you want to have with your members,” said Walker.
In addition to working with its partners, the data revolution has allowed CAA to see patterns and marry internal data across its own different businesses.
For example, connecting the dots between seasonal spikes in roadside assistance numbers has led to new ways of marketing auto insurance plans.
“What’s interesting is, while we find a lot of patterns and similarities, we also find differences. For example, the people we tend to engage to buy travel insurance are a completely different segment of the population than the people we tend to engage on things like auto insurance.”
But as the old adage goes, with great power comes great responsibility. And the responsibility to not abuse the database is something CAA takes very seriously.
To illustrate, Walker said CAA sends very few emails to members—and when it does, the emails are targeted and well-researched.
“We want to be sure that whatever we send our members really has to be relevant. So we’re really conscious about not bombarding our members. We’re not going to send them an email every single day. One of the things we have to be careful about is that we send the right email to the right member at the right time.”
While Walker wouldn’t share his open rates, he suggested “they are higher than any other organization that I’ve come across.”
Having all the data though, isn’t the same thing as having the right data and applying it correctly.
“We work very hard to capture data on every transaction and every engagement that our members have with us, and I think the secret is having good people and good technology.”
Walker said CAA doesn’t hesitate to make the necessary investment in good tools including DI Analytics and Environics’ PRIZM5 segmentation platform.
“The key part is, it saves money! Yes, you spend $50,000 to $100,000 a year on the licenses, but when you develop a marketing campaign, your cost savings are made up in one campaign.”
“We had a hell of a time doing ROI on mass media campaigns. Now, we can measure the ROI much more clearly.”
In the past two years, Walker said going deeper with the numbers—looking beyond income levels and age groups for instance—has also proved to be a fruitful pursuit.
A prime example was when CAA helped find new potential customers for a travel partner.
“There was a group of about 400,000 people that we had never targeted for this partner, because we never thought (those customers) had enough household income,” he said.
“Once we started using the appropriate data, we said ‘Oh my God, there’s this huge group of people that we haven’t been targeting!’ ”
Walker used the example of finding travelers who might be interested in river cruises in Europe—while CAA has customers in 4.3 million households, finding only perhaps a few hundred thousand potential customers is key.
“That’s the game for us at CAA. We want our members to be happy. We want them to get value from their connection to our brand. We’re a little bit different than other organizations. It’s not just about having a profit today. It’s about ensuring members renew in the future.”
Likewise, the CAA is overhauling its own brand and its rewards program, ditching the “Show Your Card and Save” phrase on the loyalty card and using the simple CAA logo instead.
“The strength of the whole thing is literally our logo. When people see our logo, they associate it with trust. And in the future, nobody is going to be showing a card. [Transactions] will use a virtual card or go through an app.”
Plus, Walker said CAA is currently updating systems at its 110,000 member locations across Canada. He called it “a huge project” that will tie together CAA’s app to locations across the country.
“In the very near future we’re going to be live with a virtual membership card where members can get all the benefit of CAA with all of our partners, without a physical card at all. They’ll be able to use their app and it’ll be there.”
“We’re excited about it going live.”
