Nissan x myElefant: Creating a mobile messaging strategy for each step of the customer journey

Nissan is working with myElefant to develop its mobile messaging strategy throughout the customer journey, both at a European level and at the local level with 150 French dealerships.

The Japanese company, which is nearly a hundred years old, is one of the largest car manufacturers in the world. The Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance was the world’s leading automotive group in terms of sales in 2017 and 2018.

The customer life cycle in the automotive sector is a lengthy one, and Nissan is involved in each of these stages. As a result, the Japanese company has been quick to attach considerable importance to the local communication methods used by its dealerships to stay in touch with their customers.

In recent years, Nissan has observed a deterioration in the performance of traditional communications channels. The search for alternative solutions that can revitalize customer relations has, therefore, become essential for this automotive giant.

With the explosion in smartphone traffic and the development of new formats, Nissan has decided to place mobile messaging at the heart of its customer relations strategy. This is was the starting point for myElefant’s collaboration with Nissan Europe!

The objective: To design and deploy a mobile messaging strategy in Europe for each step of the customer journey using the myElefant platform.

After a successful POC exercise, myElefant and Nissan decided to develop a three-pronged strategy to meet this objective:

1. To support Nissan in the deployment of local communications
2. To set up automatic relational scenarios through a connection to the Nissan CRM
3. To innovate by trying out new mobile messaging channels

In January 2018, Nissan deployed its first use case based on the Rich format from the myElefant platform with the aim of presenting the new Nissan MICRA.

The format was very well received by Nissan customers, and the campaign results are convincing. Nissan, together with myElefant, therefore decided to use the Rich SMS format for three new types of campaigns that meet specific objectives:

• Campaigns highlighting the latest Nissan innovations. (See above)
• Personalized promotional campaigns
• Interpersonal campaigns

Nissan, in its local communication strategy, also seeks to equip its dealerships with a messaging platform that will enable it to stay in close touch with its customers. This means that 150 myElefant accounts have been opened for their dealerships throughout France.

Each dealership can draw upon a catalog of operations that have been approved by central marketing and activate them whenever it wishes to reach its local customers.

In six months, 200,000 customers received these SMS messages from their dealership.

Given the extent of Nissan’s use of the myElefant solution and to expand their range of customer relationship scenarios, myElefant and Nissan have chosen to connect myElefant to the Adobe Campaign platform used by Nissan Europe. This connection has many advantages including:

• Using the dynamic and segmented lists in the Nissan CRM. This means it is no longer necessary to load customer databases on our platform
• Uploading myElefant campaign performance data directly into Adobe Campaign to make use of all the analytic finesse provided by myElefant
• Automated campaign deployment. This makes it possible to automate the sending of communications throughout the entire customer lifecycle

This connection made it possible to deploy a first scenario which automated the sending of an SMS to indicate the nearest concession for all the test applicants. (see picture above)

In 2019, and still with the objective of improving the relevance of its content, Nissan plans to take its Rich SMS campaigns to the next level by making them ultra-personal. The CRM connection, together with the analyses performed by Nissan’s predictive marketing service provider, will enable the creation of dynamic, personalized campaign models in the future.

In parallel with these Rich SMS campaigns and constantly on the lookout for innovation, myElefant, a Google RCS partner, approached the Nissan teams to introduce them to this new mobile messaging channel!

Happy with myElefant‘s expertise, strengthened by the Google partnership, Nissan immediately embraced this new format.

This collaboration has led to the development of an “after-sales” use case, a pilot presented at Mobile World Congress 2018, and which today allows Nissan to position itself as a pioneer in mobile messaging.

Article originally published on the myElefant blog site – February 2019