A New Culture Of Experimentation
Amigo enabled Hertz to adopt an agile approach to marketing, redesigning key user journeys with incredible results.
The Challenge
At the end of 2016, Hertz, a large, multinational car rental corporation, asked Amigo to help them try out a new idea in one of their marketing campaigns. Since then Hertz have used Amigo to develop a culture of agility and experimentation in their marketing department, with minimal IT involvement.
This transformative relationship began when Director of Digital Marketing, Conrad Doyle, asked Amigo to help Hertz deliver a personalised refer-a-friend campaign whilst tackling typical issues inherent in marketing at a large enterprise, particularly when it comes to technology.
The Strategy
Amigo built and tested new user experiences for the Hertz online booking journey during sales periods to make promotions more effective. During Hertz’s February 2017 sale period, Amigo enabled Hertz to trial an enhanced user experience that automatically applied relevant discounts and signposted the promotion throughout the reservation journey.
Amigo delivered this simpler user journey without requiring any changes to Hertz’s existing system. Amigo’s short build and implementation times enabled Hertz’s design and approval process to be agile, with numerous changes being made across a four week period. The process was to:
- Form a hypothesis about a possible campaign
- Deliver an experimental campaign that tests the hypothesis
- Collect the data to support or refute the hypothesis (e.g. by A/B testing)
- Roll out the improvement.
“We have been able to test new ideas in order to improve the online customer journey with a lot of flexibility and agility. Something that would usually take a lot of IT effort has been set up within weeks and within a short period of time we have results which we can trust and act on. The Amigo team are great to work with and have provided many creative ideas to push our hypothesis even further.” Charlotte Aldred, User Experience and Development Manager at Hertz
The Results
This campaign exhibited a transaction rate increase of 4.5 per cent. And when Hertz’s next sale period came around, Amigo enabled Hertz to roll out the experiment to six additional European territories. This expansion was delivered in another two weeks and led to a transaction rate increase of 11.6 per cent, with a 1200 per cent return on investment.
After the success of the promotional campaign, Amigo came up with a new hypothesis. They reasoned that if an enhanced user experience could do so much for the seasonal sales, it could probably help improve the sign-up rate for Hertz’s ‘Gold Member’ loyalty program as well.
Amigo enabled Hertz to test a new customer journey for online bookings. In this journey, customers were notified early and often that joining the loyalty program would provide them with a 10 per cent discount. Amigo also enabled Hertz to shorten the online enrolment process with a streamlined user journey.
Due to Amigo’s ability to test entire customer journeys against alternatives, Hertz could say with certainty within 10 days of launch that the new user journey was driving a major increase in sign-ups to their loyalty program. For the period of the experiment, this increase was measured at 59.6 per cent. Consequently, there was a 12 per cent uplift in revenue per visitor.
Hertz are also using Amigo to run experiments on the best ways to up-sell through the customer journey, promote through affiliates, and offer additional services with major partners.
“I would liken Amigo to A/B testing in overdrive, stitching together complex new journeys that seamlessly integrate within our existing environments.” Conrad Doyle, Director of Digital Marketing at Hertz
You can view the case study on Amigo’s website and can download a PDF version here.