Fox Rent-A-Car increases email revenue by 300%

Taking control of customer data

A leading leisure car rental company, Fox Rent-A-Car, focuses on serving budget-conscious travelers in the U.S. and around the world. Steve Mosinski, Head of Global Marketing, joined the company after the initial implementation of Optimizely. He shared with us how data from Optimizely empowered Mosinski to make impactful changes by organizing campaign schedules, perfecting send times, and A/B testing email content and design.

Before working with Optimizely, Fox Rent-A-Car used a siloed marketing automation platform that lacked the customer context across Fox Rent-A-Car's digital ecosystem. Furthermore, Fox Rent-A-Car's previous solution for email campaigns lacked the segmentation capabilities needed to maintain a healthy sender reputation.

Without the customer context and the segmentation to target appropriately, many emails were deemed irrelevant to customers and routed to spam folders. As a result, limitations in their technology stack were costing Fox Rent-A-Car big.

At Optimizely, we're on a mission to unlock digital potential. Our market-leading Digital Experience Platform (DXP) offers brands a composable marketing technology stack that empowers marketing leaders like Mosinski with control over their brand's customer data while providing the ease-of-use for confident creation.

At the core of the DXP is Optimizely Data Platform (ODP), and for brands like Fox Rent-A-Car, the keys to customer lifecycle marketing.

Since launching advanced segmentation and automation with Optimizely Data Platform (ODP), Fox Rent-A-Car has seen a 300% YoY increase in email revenue and successfully restored its email deliverability. 

Maintenance was overdue

By the time Fox Rent-A-Car began using Data Platform, they had emailed over a million people multiple times a week. As is too often the case for marketers today, it was challenging to identify bad email addresses and disengaged customers, which led to high hard bounce rates and a high percentage of spam trap hits.

Unsatisfactory deliverability, consequently, eroded their sender reputation. So, in October 2018, the team took a leap of faith. Fox Rent-A-Car decreased send volumes (to as low as 200,000) to send in smaller batches and perfect deliverability.

The team scrubbed their database to get rid of stale emails and began segmenting their customer base with Optimizely's data science algorithms to find insights hidden from within their customer data.

Then, partnering with Optimizely, they watched deliverability improvement and started adding back contacts to the list every month.

As a result, their sender reputation has been steadily improving, and they have reduced spam trap hits by 98% due to their list hygiene practices and Optimizely's segmentation capabilities. 

Getting back on the road with winning campaigns

Mosinski's strategy to use Data Platform to segment his customer database paid off.

"We had tremendous success focusing on our customers in our emails and providing logical actions within our email campaigns," says Mosinski, referring to their highly relevant and beautifully designed emails.

"I love the flexibility of [Data Platform] and that it allows us to create these campaigns. And I love the investment our customer success manager has in our brand," he later added. 

Currently, Mosinski is operating four major ongoing campaigns. He sends newsletters with the week's specials and automated emails to follow up when they abandon a car reservation flow or browse without a significant event.

Each automated email is personalized with content and offers suggested by Data Platform to be statistically most likely to convert. The third campaign consists of extraordinarily successful location-specific post-purchase messages.

Post-purchase emails use recipients' travel destinations to supply even more personalization. For example, emails share fun information and blog posts about the traveler's intended destinations.

Mosinski has shared that these campaigns generate an industry-leading average of 32% open rate, 6% click rate, 21% conversion rate.

With fantastic metrics like that, it's no surprise that Mosinski loves starting his day by looking at his campaign performance dashboards in the Data Platform.

"The analytics are available at once to me. Sometimes it's the first thing I look at in the morning," said Mosinski.

Where do we go from here?

Mosinski and the Fox Rent-A-Car team are ahead of the game, and nothing stands in their way of delighting their customers. As of November 2019, the group runs an evergreen campaign that distributes information on products and services.

The emails go out every Tuesday and focus on one of the four topics of value, loyalty, geography, or vehicle fleet type. And as the market changes, the team will adjust the topics of this flow to remain relevant to their customers.