increase in digital event sales YoY
increase in webinar-attributed sales YoY in 2021 and 48% in 2022
increase in attendance YoY for both webinar and digital events
Products: ON24 Webcast Elite, ON24 Engagement Hub, ON24 Target, ON24 Connect (SFDC)
Industry: Association
Use cases: Demand generation, partner enablement, certification, brand and thought leadership
Number of employees: 10,001+
The team at AAA The Auto Club Group uses ON24 to engage current and prospective members and to certify, train and enable partners and employees to sell travel. The Auto Club Group’s successful use of ON24 has instilled confidence in their partners, helping them to secure co-operative marketing funds to grow their business.
The Auto Club Group (ACG) is the second largest AAA club in North America with more than 13 million members across 14 U.S. states, the province of Quebec and two U.S. territories. ACG and its affiliates provide members with roadside assistance, insurance products, banking and financial services, travel offerings and more. ACG belongs to the national AAA federation with more than 62 million members in the United States and Canada. One of North America’s largest leisure travel agencies, AAA offers a full range of travel services, including worldwide hotel, car rental, rail, tour and cruise packages, international driving permits and travel insurance.
Many of AAA, The Auto Club Group’s 13 million members live outside of branch locations. While the team hosts a multitude of regional events, it is challenging to reach customers who do not live within proximity.
“Traditional event engagement tends to span about 15 miles from our branches, so the question was, ‘How do we expand our reach to members outside of that radius?’” said Jessica Brady, Manager, Marketing Strategy. “This challenge became more significant with the pandemic, because now we had to rethink our entire engagement strategy.”
Furthermore, in-person travel events were used to educate, and enable their agents to sell the company’s diverse range of travel products. While these events were successful, they were at times costly, and in some instances limited in their ability to customize and scale.
Additionally, in-person events made it hard to capture the audience insights needed to optimize their programs, personalize follow-up, and provide the right information to the right audience.
“Traditional event engagement tends to span about 15 miles from our branches, so the question was, ‘How do we expand our reach to members outside of that radius?’ This challenge became more significant with the pandemic, because now we had to rethink our entire engagement strategy.”
Jessica Brady
Manager, Marketing Strategy
By developing a complementary digital engagement strategy, AAA, The Auto Club Group can provide customers, agents, partners and employees with relevant, up-to-date information and resources. Utilizing digital channels of enrollment, education, and enablement has helped the team reach wider audiences, deliver more personalized experiences, capture valuable insights, and achieve better outcomes with fewer resources.
Two-way engagement for partners, employees and prospects
With ON24, the team at AAA, The Auto Club Group was able to create targeted and interactive digital travel experiences catered to different audience segments – members, travel partners, employees, and prospective members – and deliver them as channels of two-way engagement instead of a series of static content offers. That engagement enabled the team to capture valuable audience insights that helped them refine their messaging and sales followup to drive more engagement.
Expands reach to regional members
With ON24-powered webinars and digital content experiences, the team at AAA, The Auto Club Group can deliver information on products and services, engaging customers who were either too far to visit regional offices or preferred to be engaged digitally. Through their webinar channel, they are able to turn informative sessions into authentic, engaging experiences that enable audiences to ask questions in real time, access additional resources, respond to polls and surveys, engage with agents virtually or even click QR codes to register for virtual events. All these engagement tools empower the team to capture valuable attendee insights and provide customers with a more personalized experience.
Enablement and certification, at scale
To enable, educate and certify partners and agents to more effectively sell to members, the team uses ON24 to build, duplicate and customize a bi-weekly travel webinar series, “Well-Traveled with AAA”, and semi-annual virtual travel events, along with weekly travel agent trainings.
For AAA, The Auto Club Group’s travel partners, this means that every episode of the “Well-Traveled with AAA” experience has a unique look and feel based on each respective partner’s product and featured destination. They also include unique poll questions and man the backend with the appropriate staff to handle incoming inquiries, in real time.
Agents and consumers can access and interact with these experiences anytime, anywhere, and self-educate their way through the content most relevant to them. “Interactive elements like polls, surveys, live Q&A and contact-an-agent CTAs keep our audiences engaged and help us capture immediate feedback on the relevance of our content,” said Brady.
To enable employees, the team delivers weekly digital product and service trainings for internal agents. “We invite representatives from our leading cruise and tour partners to train our agents on their latest itineraries, destinations, and experiences,” said Brady. “This helps our travel agents to better understand the market offerings and effectively sell to our members.”
Automations and integrations saves countless hours
“We value ON24’s ability to integrate with Salesforce, helping us automate workflows and providing detailed analytics,” said Brady. For example, the platform can track an agent’s progress toward certification completion. Once completed, the platform automatically sends a completion email and links to other relevant content. However, if an agent does not complete the course, the platform will trigger a separate email flow encouraging them to attend the on-demand session to complete their certification.
Engagement data captured from every experience is turned into actionable insights that illuminate the interests (and intent where applicable) of every attendee and flows directly into the CRM (Salesforce), eliminating manual data entry and creating a single source of truth for team members relying on these insights to better engage members, prospective members, agents, partners and employees.
“Interactive elements like polls, surveys, live Q&A and contact an agent CTAs keep our audience engaged and help us capture immediate feedback on the relevance of our content.”
Jessica Brady
Manager, Marketing Strategy,
Since adopting ON24, the team has seen a 41% increase in digital event sales YoY, a 104% increase in webinar-attributed sales YoY in 2021 and 48% in 2022 and a 14% increase in attendance YoY for both webinar and digital events.
“ON24 gives us the ability to create holistic digital travel experiences for consumers, agents, partners and employees,” said Brady. “ON24 continues to help us expand each use case to grow business throughout our footprint.”
