How Wonga transformed customer engagement and boosted customer acquisition with Braze
The challenge: Legacy communications system hampering efficiency
Wonga was operating with an ageing marketing technology stack, relying on separate platforms to manage customer communications. This fragmented system created significant hurdles to growth and efficiency:
- Siloed customer data: With information spread across multiple systems, achieving a single, unified view of the customer was a challenge. This prevented effective segmentation and personalisation.
- Inefficient campaign execution: Managing campaigns across multiple platforms was slow and resource-intensive, and lacked event-driven execution – resulting in longer lead times across platforms
- Inability to maximise customer value: Without the ability to react to customer behaviour in real time, Wonga was missing opportunities to deliver relevant messaging and behaviour-based offers.
- Operational costs: Maintaining multiple platforms and the heavy reliance on internal resources, without integration partners support, for campaign and data setup resulted in unnecessary complexity.
Wonga needed to unify its approach to customer engagement to reduce complexity and unlock new revenue streams.
The solution: A unified, real-time engagement platform
In partnership with YOUKNOW, Wonga implemented Braze as its central customer engagement platform. This strategic move consolidated their marketing efforts into a single, powerful solution.
Addressing key opportunities, the solution implemented four architectural pillars:
- Unified customer profiles: Key customer data was integrated into Braze, creating a comprehensive, real-time view of every user.
- Advanced segmentation: As a responsible lender, Wonga leveraged Braze's sophisticated segmentation capabilities, using custom attributes and events to group customers based on their behaviour, application and credit lifecycle stage.
- Cross-channel orchestration: With Braze, Wonga could design and automate complex customer journeys across multiple channels, including email, in-journey messages, outbound call campaigns, and SMS, all from a single platform.
- Personalisation at scale: The marketing team was empowered to deliver hyper-personalised messages and offers, reacting instantly to user actions to provide relevant content and context at the perfect moment.
This streamlined solution gave the Wonga team the tools to build more meaningful and valuable relationships with their customers.
The impact: Driving efficiency, revenue, and a better customer experience
The implementation of Braze delivered transformative results across the business, turning Wonga's customer engagement challenges into competitive advantages.
- Drastic improvement in operational efficiency: By consolidating multiple martech platforms into one, Wonga dramatically simplified its campaign launch process and significantly reduced its reliance on internal resources.
- Increased customer engagement: The ability to deliver timely, personalised campaigns and offers led to more than a 40% increase in uptake from email alone.
- Enhanced speed to market: The marketing team could now ideate, build, and launch sophisticated multi-channel campaigns faster than ever before, allowing them to be more agile and responsive to customer needs and market opportunities.
- Deeply personalised customer journeys: Customers began receiving meaningful, relevant messages that enhanced their experience, strengthening brand loyalty and driving engagement, measured by website traffic, up by nearly 20%.
By embracing a unified platform strategy with Braze and YOUKNOW, Wonga successfully reduced costs, increased revenue, and placed the customer at the heart of its business.
“As partners, our role is never just about technology, it’s about enabling teams to unlock real outcomes,” said Kelvin Jonck, CEO of YOUKNOW Technologies. “What excites me most about Wonga’s success is not only the impressive numbers, but how quickly they were able to turn complexity into simplicity, and data into meaningful customer connections. Wonga has shown us that with the right tools and mindset, brands can scale personalisation without losing the human touch.”
About Wonga
Wonga is a prominent fintech company focused on delivering fast, responsible, and customer-centric financial solutions. By combining innovative technology with a deep understanding of customer needs, Wonga is committed to providing transparent and flexible credit products that empower customers to manage their finances more effectively.
About YOUKNOW Technologies
YOUKNOW Technologies is a premier provider of marketing technology solutions in South Africa, committed to helping organisations deliver deeply personalised, effective customer engagement. Through strategic technology partnerships, expert implementation, and an acute focus on customer-centricity, YOUKNOW enables brands like Wonga to rethink engagement, reduce complexity, and unlock measurable growth.