“Our new journey approach has brought us closer to our customers. We have truly learned a lot about our customer segments, which at times were counter to what our perception was. Only by watching their behavior throughout the journeys in Blueshift were we really able to see that.”

Joyce Poole
Joyce Poole Sr. Director, Marketing CRM, LendingTree
Lending Tree logo over image of a woman sitting behind a computer
+17%
Monthly Active Users
+48%
Increased Open Rates

The Challenge

Drive engagement and improve experiences throughout the customer lifecycle by reimagining journeys to be customer-first and create value beyond the transaction.

The Outcome

LendingTree increased engagement, monthly active users, and improved workflow efficiencies by building connected lifecycle journeys focused on their customers.

Overview

LendingTree’s mission is to simplify financial decisions for life’s meaningful moments through choice, education, and support by making comparison shopping for the best loan deal fast and easy. For years, LendingTree has been using Blueshift to make their marketing more relevant and drive sustained growth by activating their rich data into financial profiles. However, as they continued to expand their financial products, they saw an opportunity to evolve their engagement strategies to be more customer-centric.

Lending Tree personalized loan offer

Objective

Reimagine Experiences Around What’s Right for the Customer

The company offers financial products that each have different buying paths. The customer segments for these products are in varying life stages and financial standings, which impacts product eligibility and campaign goals. The result is that LendingTree’s volume of campaigns exploded in recent years as new products were added. Compounding the challenge, financial products have a long runway to cross-sells, which created breaks in engagement and added effort to reacquire customers. The team realized that their growing series of individual, disconnected email and push campaigns were not only increasingly hard to manage, but also ultimately weren’t providing the best customer experience. To continue to put the customer first and add value throughout the lifecycle, LendingTree set out on a big strategic shift to create intentional lifecycle journeys specific to each product and further tailor those experiences to each customer’s unique journey with the company.

“Every company has data, but if you can’t action off that data instantly, then it doesn’t do you any good. And when dealing in financial products…you better get it right. The magic with Blueshift is its agility and ability to handle data for segmentation, journeys, and personalization across all channels, no matter the speed or attributes that we put in. We have the flexibility to use our data to improve results across many different use cases.”

Joyce Poole
Joyce Poole Sr. Director, Marketing CRM, LendingTree

Strategy

Become a Trusted Advisor Beyond the Transaction

To make the strategic switch, the team had to disassemble their existing customer engagement strategy without affecting any active campaigns. With the visibility that Blueshift provides into each stage of the customer journey, the LendingTree team was able to get closer to the customer by understanding the distinct behaviors of their numerous segments. They used this insight to create intentional, connected journeys and target their campaigns more effectively — ultimately allowing them to better serve their customers.

Take the Customer-First Approach to the Next Level

The team began by auditing all communications through the lens of the customer and thought, “What should we be doing for the customer, and what does the customer expect from us?” They identified where customers needed guidance, where they could help customers find what they’re looking for faster, and where there was an opportunity to cross-sell. This process allowed them to redefine new buying paths and create intuitive journeys for each type of customer.

“The application of the data really sets Blueshift apart. The functionality of being able to use that data in so many different ways, whether it’s targeting users in very granular segments or dynamically populating templates, is what we really need.”

Jessica Cleland
Jessica Cleland Director, Email Marketing, LendingTree
User profile journey builder

Solution

Smarter Journeys with Deeper Personalization

In addition to providing LendingTree with one view of a customer’s lifecycle and the ability to trigger the right message based on where each customer is in their unique journey, the LendingTree team relied on the following Blueshift capabilities to successfully launch their lifecycle journey strategy:

  • Actionable Customer Profiles unify rich data gathered from form fills, web behavior, product interactions, and more and make it actionable for targeting and messaging across channels.
  • Advanced Segmentation lets the team easily build granular segments based on any combination of user attributes from the credit profile as well as custom attributes and events.
  • Campaign Journey Builder enables the team to easily create and launch sophisticated omnichannel journeys that trigger off key events, such as changes in credit score, and signals from web behavior to create real-time, connected experiences.
  • External Fetch allows them to confidently deliver relevant, timely messages with accurate, real-time information by dynamically populating the message at the time of open.
  • Insights makes it easy to build reports and dashboards and share with key stakeholders to provide quick insights into performance.

The team continues to use visibility into their customer journeys to improve their strategy by iterating and testing to continuously optimize these journeys.

“If you’re really thinking about how to customize to the nth degree, you have to go with a platform like Blueshift that has all the tools to make robust journeys smarter and customer engagement more effective. You have the ability to coordinate and personalize multiple channels in a customer journey at the push of a button.”

Joyce Poole
Joyce Poole Sr. Director, Marketing CRM, LendingTree

Results

With their new strategy, LendingTree was able to:

+17% Monthly Active Users

By using intentional, relevant messaging

+48% Open Rates

Increased customer engagement

Increased Workflow Efficiencies

By building intentional customer journeys and reducing disparate campaigns