AAA Northeast accelerates member-first experiences.

Mark Pelletier and Lisa Melton remember exactly how they were introduced to AAA. For Pelletier, who is now senior vice president, e-business, for AAA Northeast (AAANE), that moment arrived when he got his first car and his mother gave him a AAA membership to carry for the road ahead.

Melton, now chief marketing officer for AAANE, experienced AAA’s trusted services as a young adult planning a cross-country road trip. She visited the AAA office in Buffalo, New York, where a representative built her a custom AAA TripTik® travel planner and manually marked every construction obstacle along the way.

Little did Melton and Pelletier know that one day they would be working together as strategic partners, closely aligned in AAANE’s mission to provide exactly these types of highly personalized experiences — now digital — to more than 6.7 million members, all while delivering year-over-year record growth to the business.

A member-first strategy, a data-centric approach.

As part of the extensive AAA network serving 65 million members across the US and Canada, AAANE has established a powerful reputation for its reliable services and trusted advice in the automotive, insurance, and travel sectors. Whether a member needs roadside assistance, full-service and self-service travel services, or competitive rates on auto, home, or life insurance, AAA is there to support its members throughout every stage of their journey.

As AAANE memberships have grown, so has its portfolio of products and services, as well as member demand for personalized digital experiences. With almost 70% of new members joining online, along with almost 6 million members renewing annually, AAANE members make millions of transactions online every year.

To enhance the member experience and seamlessly deliver the right product to the right member at the right time via the right channel, in recent years, AAANE recognized the need to modernize its offers and technology. The e-business team, led by Pelletier, knew that to advance digitally and achieve omnichannel personalization, they first needed better visibility into business performance, which would require bridging multiple data and operational silos.

To do this, AAANE first built its martech foundation on Adobe Experience Cloud solutions to measure, optimize, and personalize its digital channels. Then, with early success and value achieved with these solutions, AAANE expanded to Adobe Experience Platform applications and AI capabilities to accelerate omnichannel member engagement and further drive growth.

“Our partnership with Adobe has allowed us to transform not just our digital landscape, but our entire approach to member engagement,” Pelletier says. “Adobe solutions empower us to reach millions of our members at the right time with the right offer, enhancing both satisfaction and loyalty.”

To start, AAANE established Adobe Analytics as the source of truth for digital data, starting with web analytics, then for measuring performance of every marketing campaign and tactic.

“Our members spoke through the data, with traffic and insights to clarify what was working and what wasn’t. If a marketing tactic can’t be measured, we don’t do it,” says Melton.

Early on, Melton and Pelletier democratized data from Analytics across the business, allowing dollars and channels to be shifted quickly and seamlessly. With a comprehensive view of member behavior, Analytics allowed their teams to perform highly targeted segmentation and deliver tailored offers to members, whether promoting travel services, insurance products, or automotive assistance.

AAANE also needed a robust content management system (CMS) with the ability to track, analyze, optimize, and scale assets across channels. The company chose Adobe Experience Manager for its ability to scale and integrate with third-party systems. They used Experience Manager Sites to create high-performing webpages and experiences, and established Experience Manager Assets as its cloud-native digital assets manager (DAM).

As a team, Melton and Pelletier committed to upholding AAANE’s vision of putting members in the driver’s seat of their own digital experience. Adobe Target enabled their teams to test content and CTAs and conduct real-time website optimizations. AI capabilities in Target aggregate customer activity data from across channels and test experiences to deliver the most effective combination of content, layouts, and UX for every member.

With Target, AAANE improved conversion rates leveraging thousands of experience tests. One specific outcome — adding the top hotel destinations to a travel search widget — resulted in a 41.5% lift in hotel search results, simply by presenting destinations that its members were interested in before they manually searched for them.

This rapid testing, experimenting, and optimizing along the way were critical to Pelletier’s and Melton’s teams learning and growing together.

Melton and Pelletier’s partnership is one of complementary leadership styles and strategic perspectives. Pelletier brings an analytical mindset to every challenge, and Melton a broader brand and operational view. But the duo’s real power comes from their ability to challenge each other constructively and collaborate openly.

“When Mark and I work together,” Melton explains, “there’s no ego. It’s full transparency. The most important thing we have is complete trust. There’s such a great amount of trust in the work we do, it’s what allows our teams to work so well together.”

Pelletier elaborates, “We’re both trying to benefit from each other. And from a digital web perspective, the only way our business can be successful is getting strong traffic based on marketing’s tactics. If we’re not strong partners, I don’t know how that works.”

The partnership has allowed Melton and Pelletier to shift AAANE from a culture where the marketing team felt like “order takers” to one where every team member feels empowered to be an innovator, unafraid to experiment and even fail.

By fostering a sense of pride and ownership in the process, AAANE’s marketing and digital teams have attracted top talent from Boston’s competitive job market to its Rhode Island headquarters and have enjoyed less than 5% turnover the past three years. It’s also helped turn team members into innovators and experts.

“We don’t talk about failure,” Melton shares. “We talk about learning. That creates less fear and more excitement around the work we’re doing. It builds up people’s confidence and self-esteem.”

Pelletier adds, “We spend a lot of time telling the team that what they might consider a simple decision could bring significant improvements to the member experience and growth to our business. And the light on their face when they grasp that is something you can’t replace.”

With incredible results and an increasingly innovative digital organization, Melton and Pelletier focused on the next steps for delivering hyper-personalized member experiences across channels.

AAANE adopted Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) to further unify online and offline data sources and critical data points from each business-specific warehouse into one platform. With unified and continuously updated customer profiles, the team targeted members with greater accuracy and minimized the gap between data insight and activation. Leveraging Real-Time CDP, propensity scores powered by Customer AI, and decisioning capabilities in Adobe Journey Optimizer, AAANE’s personalized web offers converted 3X that of typical segmented offers.

“Every member’s journey is unique, and Adobe allows us to cater to these individual journeys at scale,” says Pelletier. “The actionable insights we gain and the ability to personalize experiences have been game-changers for us and our members.”

To orchestrate more sophisticated journeys with its millions of members, the team turned to Adobe Journey Optimizer. With Journey Optimizer and early testing of AI-driven emails, AAANE engaged only the most relevant members, leading to a 60 to 80% increase in conversion and yielding a 30% to 70% increase in sales, while honing the email list and allowing a dramatic reduction in list size for those campaigns.

With better tools for monitoring campaign performance, Melton’s and Pelletier’s teams continue to learn and refine.

These successes have not only validated AAANE’s transformation strategy but also turned skeptics into advocates. Internal and external partners now view Melton and Pelletier as champions of digital innovation, and the organization’s results are a model for data-driven and member-first strategies across the nationwide AAA network.