AA Smartfuel
Year in Review
Leveraging Braze to create a highly personalised Year in Review experience to drive engagement with one of NZ’s biggest loyalty programmes.
Client
AA Smartfuel
Industry
Financial Services
Type of work
- Campaigns
- Mobile apps
What we did
- Design
- Technology and development
- Strategy
Technologies
- Braze
- Native iOS
- Native Android
45.7k
Sessions in one day
15.4%
Increase in users
115.9%
New app users
3.4
Spins every 10 seconds
The challenge
Celebrate the wins
“We should be celebrating the wins with our customers”, said Jordan Tran – AA Smartfuel’s GM of Marketing and Partnerships. And with that, the challenge was laid down.
At a time when inflation and the cost of living had reached their highest levels in decades, a fuel savings loyalty programme like AA Smartfuel had never been more relevant or necessary to NZ consumers.
And thousands of Kiwis were winning every day. They just didn’t know it.
With around 1m active members per month, AA Smartfuel has one of the biggest membership bases in NZ’s ultra-competitive coalition loyalty landscape. And in 2022, these active members saved (on average) $60.83 on fuel, with the highest saving by any one individual totalling almost $3000.
Now they’re numbers worth celebrating!
Jordan and the team wanted to find a fun and engaging way for customers to discover and share the value they earned from AA Smartfuel in 2022. They wanted to recognise and reward their most engaged members and give them a virtual pat on the back for making the most of the savings on offer. And they wanted to give dormant and non-members a compelling reason to take another look at the programme.
Our answer was to wheel out an old classic—the good ol’ Year in Review—but with a modern and highly personalised spin.
"We often overlook the savings we make throughout the year with loyalty programmes, and so this was our way of helping Kiwis realise the hard work they’ve put in, and more importantly, what they’ve been rewarded with in return."
Jordan Tran
Marketing Manager, AA Smartfuel
The solution
Data
The Year in Review concept is well known and well understood. The best ones take day-to-day activity and turn it into a fun playback that feels like new news—think Spotify’s Wrapped or Strava’s Year in Sport.
AA Smartfuel had a huge amount of transactional data to work with—from when and where people swiped their card to the Cents per Litre (CPL) they earned and the fuel savings they redeemed it for. The challenge was to package this up freshly and compellingly in a channel that customers would interact with at scale.
AA Smartfuel’s mobile app was a growing channel for the brand. And we all agreed that driving downloads and stimulating app usage would be a welcome by-product of the campaign.
So with the concept locked in and channel decision made, our next challenge was to work out what data to present and how to integrate with the AA Smartfuel back-end to retrieve and present millions of data points to customers in near real-time.
Fortunately, AA Smartfuel had recently implemented Braze—a world-leading customer engagement platform—to help create highly personalised, data-driven experiences across all channels. The campaign would leverage Braze features at each journey stage, from data ingestion and cross-channel promotion to message delivery and personalisation.
Integrating with Braze was a breeze. AA Smartfuel loaded more than 27 million data attributes into the Braze platform, 18 data attributes per customer across the total base that engaged with AA Smartfuel in 2022, and we used APIs to retrieve the appropriate data points in real-time for each authenticated app session.
Creating segments and utilising real-time data, we were able to maximise the effect of Braze Canvases to deliver personalised experiences for different customer groups, validated in real-time at delivery.
Creative, customer experience and comms
But this campaign wasn’t just about data smarts. The final challenge was the creative concept. And our answer was to design a road trip through 2022, with each stop representing another personalised data point. Each customer could see their CPL earned relative to the average, how much they saved compared to others in the base, how many times they swiped their card and where they earned the most discounts.
If the member hadn’t been active in the past year, we built a generic path that showcased the value earned by the base and the potential savings the customer left on the table (nothing like a bit of FOMO to re-engage the base!).
As an added incentive to engage, each participant was given the opportunity to spin and win up to $20k of prizes at the end of their journey and a chance to spin again if they shared their results on their social media channels.
AA Smartfuel had also recently adopted a new brand advocate—Smarty Pants—who would be the perfect commentator for the customer’s drive throughout the year.
The campaign launched on 2 December 2022 with a fully integrated comms programme in owned and paid channels.
AA Smartfuel used Braze to deliver personalised emails, push notifications, in-app messages and content cards in the users' news feeds.
This was supported by above-the-line digital, leveraging Braze Alloys to maximise media spend efficiency. The team could even use Braze for negative targeting to ensure any member who had already viewed their Year in Review wouldn’t see an ad—more efficient for the business and better for the customer.
The results
“We often overlook the savings we make throughout the year with loyalty programmes, and so this was our way of helping Kiwis realise the hard work they’ve put in, and more importantly, what they’ve been rewarded with in return.” – Jordan Tran.
And Kiwis took the opportunity in droves:
45.7k total sessions on Wednesday, 14 December—our biggest single day of app sessions ever
Monthly Active Users up 15.4% vs PCP
15.7k new app users—up 115.9% on PCP
We saw 3.5 draws (spins to win) every 10 seconds at our busiest
33% of those who completed the Year in Review also shared on their Socials
Outstanding results that prove (just like cars) there’s life in the old classics yet!
