Case Study: AOL increases customer retention and product adoption with Adobe Marketing Cloud (Adobe)

Adobe Marketing Cloud helps AOL engage customers with value-added services to enhance their AOL experiene

AOL, which serves more than 220 million people worldwide and offers paid subscribers a suite of value-added services (McAfee, Norton, LifeLock, etc.), faced a retention challenge: many members used only basic browser and email features and didn’t realize the full value of their subscriptions. The Retention Services team found that each additional service a customer adopts dramatically lowers churn (about 50% less likely to leave with one extra service, 80% with two), so increasing awareness and adoption of these benefits became a priority.

AOL partnered with an agency and deployed Adobe Marketing Cloud (including Adobe Target/Test&Target and Analytics) to run A/B and multivariate tests, personalize experiences, and optimize product and landing pages. Changes such as a MyBenefits progress bar drove an estimated 20% increase in benefit adoption, targeted offers produced a 20% lift in eligible-service takeup, and an action-focused MyPrivacy headline boosted conversion by 24%. The program also accelerated testing cycles, prevented harmful variants, and grew Adobe Target power users from 2 to 26, supporting more data-driven retention marketing.

AOL

Jennifer Towns

Director of Retention Marketing, Paid Services Group, AOL