Pureprofile worked with AASmartfuel in New Zealand to get a deeper understanding of their customers, and to bring their transactional segments to life by creating personas.
AA Smartfuel is one of the largest loyalty programmes in New Zealand, with over 95% of household penetration so it’s not surprising that card holders have a similar demographic profile to the average New Zealander. Information collected from AA Smartfuel customers is limited to demographics and transactional behaviour so we wanted to understand customers beyond this.
Using Pureprofile’s deep profiling we discovered the many layers of an AA Smartfuel customer to get a picture of who their customers are by looking at:
- Simple demographics and household composition
- Purchase intentions
- Media use and how they prefer to engage with brands
- Hobbies and interests
- And much more
We then went one step further to understand the individual customers within AA Smartfuel’s nine customer segments. The segments have been identified based on customer’s transactional behaviour, and categorised into three groups; core/high value, medium value and lower value.
AA Smartfuel members on the Pureprofile panel were tagged with their customer segment and we analysed hundreds of question and answers to understand how customers within each segment differed compared to other segments, and the average AA Smartfuel customer. This enabled us to get a clear picture of what type of customers fell within each segment, and helped to bring them to life.
Deep profiling of their customers has delivered a range of benefits for AA Smartfuel including:
- Media planning and channels, for all customers and individual segments
- Pureprofile and Sparcmedia’s ongoing partnership with AA Smartfuel allows us to target customers with digital advertising at a total level, by behavioural segments or by creating lookalikes
- Personalised onboarding messages and email communications to each customer segment
- AA Smartfuel’s programme partners can adopt the segments and see how they fit with their own customers and identify potential opportunities
- Creation of segment personas so that everyone within AA Smartfuel, from the call centre to senior management, has a clear picture of who their customers are within each segment.
Here are our five tips to get a deeper understanding of who your customers are:
- If you don’t have a customer segmentation, consider developing one. It is an investment but a truly valuable one that will hold its worth over time.
- Use your own first party data to build a picture of your customers then supplement this with other third party data that is available to you. Enrich your understanding using multiple sources that are complementary to deeply understand who your customers are.
- Don’t let anything stand in the way of directly asking your customers what they think – research should be easily accessible for everyone who needs it, and Pureprofile has the tools to help reach your customers quickly and affordably.
- Use your deeper knowledge of your customers to create personalised messages. Don’t use a blanket approach for all and understand that customers are different, and have varying needs.
- Be willing to change and adapt over time, understanding that today’s customers are rapidly evolving and we need to move with them.
For a copy of the presentation from MMS Auckland (April 2018) please email emily@pureprofile.com
