How RVezy Leveraged Dynamic Personalization to Achieve a 69.3% Open Rate

RVezy puts its adventure-seeking customers in the driver's seat by helping RV owners and renters find their ideal home-on-wheels as they explore the open road. With a mission of helping people to share the magic of the great outdoors, they’ve created an easy way for RV owners to share their favorite pastime with others while generating income. And with over 150,000 5-star rated bookings, 24/7 roadside assistance, and best-in-class customer service, they’ve quickly risen in profile as perhaps the most trusted name in RV rentals.

At RVezy, being customer-first is their modus operandi, informing everything from their product strategy to their communications. They’re not just renting vans. They’re inspiring the customer at every step of the journey to keep coming back for more.

RVezy’s Customer-Centric Engagement Strategy

Being a two-sided marketplace comes with complexity and unique challenges. Users can potentially receive the same campaigns many different times for each booking. On top of this, the team strives to provide users with messages that feel individually relevant to their experience. This complexity eventually grew into a big headache for the CRM team as they worked to maintain their customer relationships. You can imagine the pressure that comes with the high-value asset of an RV on one side and someone’s dream vacation on the other. It is no simple task to make sure messages are personalized with the correct information like RV details, action items, or crucial details about each customer’s trip.

Before Braze, RVezy relied on a combo of point solutions to liaise between guests and customers. When the lifecycle team identified that deliverability had become a pain point, they sought an alternative solution. A RVezy product lead had such a positive experience with Braze that they quickly set out to see if it might work for them. Because the Braze platform is built on data streaming (and is capable of continuous customer engagement data exports via Braze Currents), it can function as a one-stop shop for personalized customer communications. Using Braze Canvas Flow, our customer journey orchestration tool, RVezy was able to quickly build a comprehensive communication ecosystem that could support many mission-critical business goals across the channels they were already using, like email, push notifications, and SMS.

How RVezy Eliminated Gaps in the Funnel to Optimize Engagement

To put the customer first, RVezy created a more holistic view of their hosts and guests. In particular, the CRM team wanted to help their customer success department by empowering them with the most timely and relevant information possible to serve customers with the premium experience they crave. Doing so had a significant upside, as it would provide the team with deeper insights to inform their communication strategy by enabling them to categorize and analyze different areas or segments in their customer engagement ecosystem.

The team primarily relies on a blend of email, push, and SMS to engage their customers, as well as occasional in-app messages and simple surveys to ensure they deliver the highest quality experience possible. But to help provide the best backend information to their customer success engines, they set out with one goal: To get as much value as possible out of the Braze platform’s Message Extras feature.

Here’s how they deployed their strategy:

1. The team added the message_extras Liquid tag to all of their relevant messages.
2. When someone booked with RVezy, it passed along the booking ID number as their key-value pair. This let their team know exactly which communication was sent out for each booking, providing insight beyond the user level (which the team has visibility into in Braze by default).
3. They created a dashboard for their customer success agents to access which pulled through relevant Braze data to show correct booking information.
4. More Message Extras tags were created to pass through even more granular data, like which stage a booking is at when campaigns are sent.
5. This critical information reduced recall time for agents dealing with tricky issues such as which guest or host communications were related to what booking number, or information on start-of-trip versus closeout phase, or which messaging that was transactional vs. promotional.

Braze Message Extras can supply the level of granularity the team needs to support their team and customer engagement. It’s a win-win for everyone. The end-to-end implementation of Message Extras was rapid. It’s easy to add the Liquid tag to a campaign, and the team has long-term plans to evaluate which variables they want to pass along and add to future campaigns.

RVezy relies on several Braze Alloys technology partners to round out this area of their data profiles. Those partners include Segment, which covers event creation for triggering campaigns and tracking them, Data Dog for cloud monitoring, Zendesk, which is responsible for their customer service department’s ticketing, and cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Storage (GCP).

Automated Campaigns in Action

What does speaking to the individual look like for a brand with a two-way marketplace? When you have the right data ingestion and tech stack in place, ensuring every message RVezy sends is accurate and relevant is a breeze. With the Braze platform’s Connected Content dynamic personalization tool and Currents, the team was able to level up their customer engagement strategy while spending fewer manual hours on campaign management than ever before.

Example 1: Transactional Email

1. When a customer makes a reservation with RVezy, they aren’t charged immediately for their booking.
2. To ensure there’s no sticker shock or overdraft fees, the guest receives a notice in an email stating the number of days until the payment on file is charged.
3. The email also pulls in relevant information from the customer’s profile to help make the experience feel even more personally relevant to them.

Example 2: Booking Confirmation

1. Once customers book their RV on RVezy, they message the host to confirm the reservation.
2. Once the host receives the message, they can accept or decline the request.
3. Once requested, the guest then receives a confirmation, complete with personalized details like:
   • Information about the RV
   • A link to a review
   • Booking information (e.g. dates, guests, destination)
   • A CTA to contact the host

4. The email also includes a prompt to finalize their trip to ensure extra smooth sailing on the day of departure.

Example 3: Once More, With Feeling

1. Once someone completes their RV journey with RVezy doesn’t mean the fun’s over. The team sends an email reminding them, “Great things are worth repeating,” with relevant recommendations for future trips.
2. Each user receives a series of destination spotlights relevant to their past booking to spark their wanderlust.
3. The email is also directly addressed to each user for that added personal touch.

RVezy’s Results: More engagement, more time saved

RVezy not only demonstrates personalization is a must-have for today’s brands—it demonstrates what’s possible with aplomb. By prioritizing their data and analytics infrastructure and ensuring that they have the right tools to meet pressing business goals, RVezy has been about to build a world-class customer engagement experience in Braze that slots in effortlessly with Braze Alloys technology partners to help deliver the complete customer profile necessary to support hosts and guests alike.

RVezy now has a more precise window into their campaign deliverability and performance, which they plan to use to inform the quality of their messaging going forward. They now proudly boast open and click-through rates above the industry average—69.3%, and 12.3%, respectively. RVezy has also been able to use Currents and Message Extras to achieve near-real-time information on their campaign deliverability basis, compared to daily updates before they began leveraging these technologies. In addition, RVezy’s agents were able to use their lifecycle dashboard (powered by Currents and Message Extras) to more efficiently gather data to serve their customers better, resulting in a time savings of 15 hours per week.

Key Takeaways

1. The best solutions don’t have to be the most complex. A sophisticated customer journey doesn’t necessarily mean you must build a complicated back-end to execute it. Best-in-class tools with all-in-one features can save you time while making speaking to individual customers at scale easier.
2. Being able to activate a holistic view of your customers is key to success. With Message Extras, RVezy was able to create and act on a very personalized, granular level, ensuring customers received valuable, relevant messages.

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