An experience attuned to each customer:
Mercedes-Benz Sitewide Personalization
MY ROLE:
The initiative started as a scrappy, skunk works project—with no budget, minimal engineering support, and a lot of ambition. I stepped in to lead Creative and helped shape it from the ground up. Over time, it evolved into a fully funded, cross-functional track with a dedicated team, driving some of the highest digital lead conversions for Mercedes-Benz US.
The work was presented to Daimler leadership and received with strong interest in scaling the technology to other markets.
The team included myself, a product manager, data scientists, front-end and back-end developers, a UX designer, and a project manager.
Background
With our industry-leading Personalization program for mbusa.com, we gave each visitor a unique, custom experience with every visit over time.
It was a potent way to move customers closer to purchase decisions. But it was also a way to pay off on the luxury brand’s promise of individualized attention.
Our solution was borne out of the convergence of many trends that we evolved over time: from data maturity to technological flexibility to elastic design, with customer readiness our ultimate signal. The result is nuanced, contextual, and predictive, tracking vehicle preferences with full awareness of each person’s propensity to move forward.
How Sitewide Personalization Works
Our initial Personalization efforts focused on vehicle inventory, using everything we knew about a visitor to encourage them to explore the VINs most likely to match their preferences. We saw a significant increase in leads submitted to dealers.
By persuading visitors to create profiles and log in, we furthered the possibilities for valuable, personalized experiences.
Our home page Personalization efforts targeted higher-funnel shoppers, increasing click-through rates to model pages, inventory, and offers.
Our program stands ready to expand to Ownership, including churn model data, as well as personalized financial incentives.
The Impact
460%
More likely for visitors to become a sale after interacting with personalization
58%
Increase in likelihood for visitors to proceed to Inventory
128%
Increase in lead submissions
75%
Clickthrough rate on homepage personalized CTAs
7.1 MILLION
Exposed visits in 2020
How we applied it further.
Using Personalization to Power a Seamless Online to Offline Customer Journey
Our Online to Offline (O2O) program seamlessly carries customers’ digital behavior into the offline world and vice versa, creating a more fluid path to purchase and filling information gaps for the business. It uses a series of tools (including the above-mentioned Personalization) to deliver key information to the dealership, then leverages dealership-focused offerings to quantify the sales process and bridge the gap to digital ownership records. The result is an experience that provides dealers with valuable customer insight, gives Mercedes-Benz greater control over the full marketing experience, and, above all, makes shopping for and buying a car easier, smoother, and more personal for customers.
How The Online to Offline Customer Journey Works
The backbone of the entire O2O journey is our Advanced Profile feature, which rewards customer authentication with personalized content, subscriptions, and recommendations. This creates valuable context that supports the entire shopping experience, especially within the retail space.
Retail-ready leads bundle a variety of customer information and send it in a user-friendly package for salespeople — the first-ever authenticated dealer experience on mbusa.com.
Our Inventory pages allow customers to explore the actual VINs sitting on local dealership lots. With dynamic availability, price updates, and advanced filter options, it provides shoppers unprecedented showroom access online.
Our Digital Dealer Tools bring a variety of online shopping information into the dealership and bridge the gap between online shopping and vehicle ownership.
The Impact
24.3
Saved vehicles per month
21X
Growth in lead gen among authenticated visitors
21 MILLION
Inventory visits in 2021
How we powered it.
We created a Mercedes-Benz Marketing Data Warehouse before “customer data platform” was even a term, we built one for Mercedes-Benz, and what began as an experiment is now an integral tool for the business.
Our bespoke Marketing Data Warehouse draws on a comprehensive range of sources, empowering Mercedes-Benz to make decisions based on customer value to the brand. Its predictive capabilities harness the latest developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning to create impact across the organization, from line set planning to media optimization, churn prediction, dealer incentive optimization and more. As impressive as its massive range and big-picture modeling is its ability to provide insight on each individual customer.
How the Mercedes-Benz Marketing Data Warehouse Works
Built using Google Cloud Platform services, MDW allows us to collect, process and analyze every digital shopping journey at scale.
Data is socialized across all channel partners, including Adobe Experience Manager, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Google Data Studio, and Mercedes’ own dashboards.
Through machine learning, the platform generates new metrics every day, from propensity modeling to vehicle preferences, live inventory models, and customer next-best actions.
MDW has allowed Mercedes-Benz to progress from media optimization to behavioral modeling all the way to understanding vehicle demand for line-set planning, with implications for vehicle production.
The Impact
20+
Data Resources
12+
Productionized machine learning models
44 MILLION
Predictions issued daily
8X
Lead generation from MDW-assisted
personalization
90%