CrossCountry Trains

Case Study

Segmentation

June 2019

Client

CrossCountry trains operates the most extensive rail network in the UK and transports 33 million passengers a year from as far north as Aberdeen all the way down to Penzance. Due to it’s national coverage, the network sees a diverse mix of commuters and leisure travelers, each with their own wants and needs.

Project Background

CrossCountry wanted to increase revenue, improve customer experience and improve on any marketing investment they made. They had access to a many data streams however with no clear structure, it was difficult to use this data effectively to achieve these goals. Atreemo's Single Customer View offered a solution which would provide CrossCountry with the structure they'd need for their data.

Objectives

Increase YOY sales by 25% from CRM marketing activity
5:1 ROI from the application of Atreemo's SCV
Increase NPS score by 3 points within 12 months

Data was taken from 3rd party booking platforms, the CrossCountry website and a range of internal data sources. When this data was imported into our system, we applied recency & frequency scoring to create the initial segmentation, allowing us to see how many customers sat in the loyalty pyramid and how often these customers traveled.

Once we had this initial data set, we could start applying a series of secondary segments which would allow us to gain a more granular understanding of CrossCountry's customers. This ranged from knowing a customers gender to their reason for travel, allowing the right messages to be delivered at the right time.

We integrated our e-broadcasting, SMS and survey tools with the database that had now been to created to provide a closed loop solution with all future interactions tracked and measured.

The final step was to go through a white-listing process on CrossCountry's IP address to ensure all emails sent had the best possible chance of being delivered into a customers email inbox. Without this process there's an increased chance that emails will not be properly received, no matter how much segmentation has gone in to a campaign build.

Process

Results

The database is now automatically updated every day with every customer re-scored to ensure they remain in the correct Recency Frequency segment and any secondary segments applied accordingly. In the first year alone the database grew by almost 20%. Over the same period, delivery rates increased from 25% to 95%, and open and click rates across all campaigns doubled!

Using the new database and segmentation capabilities provided by Atreemo, CrossCountry were able to deliver highly personalised and targeted communications, which in turn delivered a 55% increase in marketing sales, more than double their original target. As a result, CrossCountry's overall return on investment of 136:1, a significant increase on the original 5:1 target!

Furthermore, based on customer feedback that CrossCountry have been able to track through Atreemo, they have been able to increase their NPS score by 5 points in the same period that saw such major improvements in campaign engagement and deliverability.

Summary

In summary, CrossCountry now have an ever evolving and highly segmented single customer view. They know who their customers are, how often they travel, their value and also what they think of the service.

They delivered +55% in incremental sales from CRM and an ROI of 136:1. They have also used their new found knowledge to improve their Net Promoter Score by 5 points in the last 12 months.