Care.com Strengthens Loyalty Among Its 13 Million Members with IBM Commerce

SOURCE: IBM

ARMONK, NY – 8 April 2015: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced its longstanding collaboration with Care.com, the world’s largest online destination for finding and managing family daycare. Working with IBM Commerce, Care.com increases customer loyalty and engagement via behavior-driven, automated marketing interactions that are personalized and relevant to each individual.

With a small internal CRM marketing team and more than 13 million users, spanning from providers and seekers of child, senior, pet, and home care, Care.com wanted to improve their email marketing communications, but needed support personalizing and customizing their messages. The Care.com team turned to the IBM Commerce Silverpop tool to target and individualize communications and improve customer loyalty through an engaging customer experience.

“Providing an engaging experience that drives customer loyalty is a top priority for our marketing team,” said Samantha White, Associate Marketing Manager at Care.com. “With Silverpop, we can better engage with users throughout their journey, while also providing our marketing team with deeper insights into each customer touch point. Moving forward, we plan to implement additional automated campaigns that use more behavior-driven content and personalization to further improve customer loyalty.”

The Care.com CRM marketing team employs a variety of Silverpop’s behavior-based automated programs, designed to provide a consistent experience from initial interaction to a loyal customer. By automating various marketing programs, Care.com achieves a level of personalization that would not be possible in a manual process – and is able to focus efforts on additional marketing efforts. Those include:

Welcome Series: Care.com has more than 20 different welcome programs, each of which automatically triggers an email when a user completes registration. The programs use IBM Commerce capability  to  populate imagesand content that pertain to each user’s specific needs or interests. Instead of sending a generic welcome email to all users, Care.com ensures each user is getting a personalized, engaging email experience tied to their specific requirements and needs. Since implementing these programs, customer engagement has increased significantly resulting from tailored, dynamic messaging.

Abandoned Cart: The Care.com team noticed users were leaving the membership upgrade page without completing the process and saw an opportunity to improve the customer experience. Now, when members visit this landing page, but do not submit their information, an automated IBM Commerce program triggers an email one day after form abandonment to remind the individual to complete the upgrade. To date, the team has seen a substantial lift in conversions where none previously existed.

Reactivation Stream: Before a user is considered dormant – or an individual that has not interacted with the Care.com website for nearly 120 days – the contact is placed in a disengaged user program. Care.com automated this process by establishing business rules, based on their own “dormant” criteria, within IBM Commerce. These disengaged users are automatically pulled into the series and receive “We Miss You” emails with the goal of drawing them back to the website and logging in again. Since implementing this program more than a year ago, it has resulted in an increase in email engagement from previously disengaged users, driving additional customers to engage through to the website.

In addition to these automated programs, the team also uses surveys to keep a pulse on customer satisfaction, both with Care.com overall and the type of communications they receive. The team uses these responses to better tailor their marketing messages and provide a stronger customer experience.

“In today’s customer-driven world, highly relevant and individualized communications are what motivate buyers to engage with marketing messages,” said Kyle Buckhout, Senior Marketing Associate at Care.com. “As the world of customer experience continues to evolve, sophisticated digital marketing technology will continue to be critical in driving success across all of Care.com’s audiences.”

About IBM Commerce
IBM Commerce helps clients understand customer behavior and use insights to help deliver highly personalized and relevant experiences at every touch point. For more information on IBM Commerce, please click here.