Sesame Care Drives 15X Increase in Conversions After Streamlining Their Data Collection and Messaging with Segment and Braze

Sesame Care is a two-sided online marketplace that matches patients with healthcare providers (both in-person and via telehealth) and the inexpensive generic medications they need on a direct-pay basis. With more people than ever searching for the best price for healthcare, it’s no wonder that Sesame has served hundreds of thousands of patients and 16,000 healthcare providers in just one year.

Like many eCommerce businesses, customer engagement is essential for Sesame because its product is its website, which serves as the gateway to the healthcare they provide. And much like those businesses, a vast majority of users on Sesame’s website do not transact during their first visit. To help nurture those visitors into customers, Sesame looked to create a strategy where better user data could be collected from visitors’ behaviors (“events”), relationships could be nurtured through personalized, cross-channel communication and additional revenue could be created around the brand. That’s when they switched to Braze.

Finding the Right Mix

Before implementing Braze, Sesame Care utilized a one-dimensional marketing mix, relying almost entirely upon expensive Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to drive customers to their site and on email only for communications with existing customers. This meant they were only using email to interact with customers as a part of the checkout flow, and could only market to existing customers in this key channel. And as a company with a small team providing a healthcare-related service, which often requires handling sensitive information, they needed a platform that:

• Was easy-to-use
• Could be managed by an individual team member or a small team
• Was HIPAA compliant

Luckily, Segment and Braze were there to help.

Sesame Care started by adjusting their strategy to include email address collection so they could nurture relationships and guide new users to make purchases. Then, they set up Segment, a customer data platform (CDP) that simplifies data collection by handling all events, unifying that event-related data, and then routing it to the other locations in the brand’s marketing and analytics stack, like Braze. Segment’s seamless integration with Braze via Currents, which continuously streams data from the Braze platform, removed the need for Sesame to craft API calls and as a result, user events exposed to Segment could be picked up by Braze automatically. This freed Sesame Care's engineering team up to work on higher-impact opportunities.

Then, using Braze, Sesame created a follow-up Canvas, which is a single unified interface where marketers can set up campaigns with multiple messaging types to form a cohesive customer journey. With their Canvas, Sesame conducted large-scale testing with four message frequency options–low, medium, high, and very high—based upon data received from Segment. Running this Canvas for a few months allowed Sesame to understand the impact of each level, what frequency level yielded the best results, and how best to utilize that information to get first-time buyers to return and make additional purchases.

Sesame was also able to utilize Canvas to automatically split the qualified user base evenly across those four different paths and create branches for each of their different membership tiers, which in turn allowed them better personalize messaging across their entire user base

Less Manual Work, More Conversions

As a result of using Braze and integrating Segment with Braze, Sesame was able to streamline their email communications strategy and see a 15X lift in last-click conversions per week. And due to rigorous frequency testing, deeper personalization, and more real-time adjustability in segmentation and messaging content, Sesame’s email marketing has gone from being a top 10 contributor to a top 3 contributor to the growth of their business.

Additionally, the seamless integration of Segment with Braze, the flexibility of the Braze Canvas, and the fact that they no longer need to manually create API calls and user segments will ultimately add future scalability for Sesame, even with a small team of two managing their campaigns.

“Braze made it possible for us to reinvent our customer engagement strategy by embracing cross-channel messaging and driving more impact with the messages we send,” said Brett Doyle, Head of CRM at Sesame Care. “Finding a HIPAA-compliant platform capable of supporting our marketing vision has been a game changer for us.”

Final Thoughts

Even as new ways to engage customers emerge, email is still king, boasting the highest impact on ROI. But many marketers still aren’t using powerful, personalized email campaigns to drive conversions, losing out on potential new and repeat customers. Collecting emails, then unifying user data with Segment and integrating it with Braze to test and perfect their email strategy allowed Sesame Care to provide a more personalized experience, harness the power of this essential channel, and improve their rate of conversion, all while ensuring future scalability as the brand (and their marketing mix) grows.

Want to learn how Braze and Segment can streamline your data collection and communications? Check out our guide on how to get started with Segment.

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