LendingTree Grows Customer Engagement with Intentional Lifecycle Journeys

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.

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.

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.

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.

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