Executive summary
Omnichannel marketing, predictive modeling, and audience segmentation were only the beginning. Now Subaru takes on improving customer loyalty and new product design with data.
Subaru initially turned to a customer data platform (CDP) to segment audiences, target those most likely to buy soon, and personalize each customer journey to improve the odds of making a sale. In just a few weeks, the company was up and running with the new CDP. After quickly blowing past its initial goals, Subaru realized it could do so much more with its data. Now Subaru uses post-purchase customer data and predictive analytics to design new products and services that bring in revenue and build customer loyalty.
By unifying our customer data, the possibilities to improve the customer experience are endless.
Atsushi Yasumuro
Senior Manager of Digital Marketing
Challenges
Which customers are ready to buy soon? That was the question that first motivated Subaru to harness the horsepower of its own data. The company had plenty of data—from dealerships, the MySubaru loyalty app, maintenance facilities, websites, advertising, marketing tools, and social media—but it was so disjointed and siloed that Subaru often relied on gut feelings and limited data sets to form its marketing and advertising strategy.
To optimize marketing ROI, Subaru needed to personalize the customer experience by gathering all its first-party customer data and merging it with third-party data. Unfortunately, many of the tools and data sources Subaru used did not easily integrate with each other. And it didn’t help that most of the first-party data was either hidden or scattered among various corporate departments. To further complicate matters, each vehicle model had its own advertising data, managed by separate agencies.
But after meeting or surpassing all of these objectives, Subaru realized how transformative post-sales customer data could be. The company had two new goals: better use of its post-sales data in product design and building brand loyalty to increase lifetime customer value.
Solution
Treasure Data’s enterprise CDP provided Subaru with an easy, plug-and-play solution that was up and running in a few weeks and integrated all its disparate data sources. Their multiple advertising agencies, each managed by a different product team, could share necessary data and still work independently.
Subaru learned how to figure out who had almost decided to purchase and to optimize such customers’ experiences to improve conversion rates. They created behavior-based audience segments to personalize communications for different segments—driving conversions, revenue growth, and more cost-effective advertising. Unified customer data and predictive modeling improved close rates and ad performance, cut costs, and improved collaboration and communication between marketing and sales teams.
Results
Subaru now understands how data can transform other functions of its organization. It’s using post-sales customer data to understand how to design new products and services that improve revenue and cement customer brand loyalty. Perhaps the biggest change of all at Subaru is that the company now knows that with the right customer data, “the possibilities to improve the customer experience are endless” – when you have a customer 360 view.
With Treasure Data, Subaru is able to:
- Achieve a 350% boost in new ad campaign performance by feeding targeted content to each customer segment
- Use post-purchase customer data and feedback to develop new products and services that build customer loyalty
- Increase dealership sales using online data for offline lead scoring
- Unify more than 80 billion data records for an accurate understanding of every customer
Collect 8 million new transactions daily for real-time customer data accuracy
