The rent-to-own retail sector puts a new spin on the classic “need vs. want” consumer equation. It’s designed for consumers who don’t have the financial resources to immediately pay for big-ticket purchases (and who don’t want to pay the interest that can accrue with buy now, pay later services or credit cards), but who are comfortable with making relatively small monthly payments.
“Our appeal to customers is not just affordability but also flexibility,” said Carla Dodds, Chief Marketing Officer at Aaron’s and BrandsMart USA, both part of The Aaron’s Company, in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “We don’t look at [customer interactions] as one transaction and we’re done. Okay, you bought a refrigerator last month; how about a couch? You needed a refrigerator, but you wanted a couch.”
The ability to fine-tune and personalize customer communications so that they meet both these “need” and “want” states has been a key benefit of a pilot program leveraging technology from Zeta Global. The program centralized Aaron’s formerly siloed customer data as part of reaching its overall goals: to acquire new customers and to provide Aaron’s executives with a better understanding of its total addressable market.
“Traditionally Aaron’s has focused on returning customers, but we noticed that our customers were aging over time,” said Dodds. “We wanted to understand who the new customer is, including truly understanding their customer behavior as well as how it parallels to existing customers’ behavior.”
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The results after just eight weeks have been impressive: during this period, Aaron’s gained nearly 2,400 net-new customers, and perhaps even more importantly, reduced its customer acquisition costs by 33%.
Personalization and Multi-Touch Attribution Create Dynamic View of Customers
These results would be impressive for any retailer, but they’re particularly striking given the complexity of the rent-to-own sector. “The typical retailer is more ‘want’-driven, but we’re dealing with the symbiotic relationship between ‘need’ and ‘want,’” said Dodds.
For one thing, that means the competitive landscape can differ markedly from customer to customer, and also from product category to product category. “We have direct competitors in the rent-to-own space, but [our competitors] could also be Home Goods or a marketplace or even a garage sale, as well as Walmart and Amazon,” noted Dodds. “It also depends on the category — our biggest categories are furniture, appliances and electronics, and for the latter our competitor could be Best Buy.”
Dodds admitted that Aaron’s had previously lacked the ability to centralize customer data in ways that allowed for much personalization: “We didn’t have a true CRM [customer relationship management] solution, but by partnering with Zeta Global, we’re able to bring all the data together in a more centralized way, which allows us to personalize in new ways and across channels,” she said.
Aaron’s had been working with Zeta Global solely on its email outreach, but is now expanding the relationship to include several other marketing functions, a move that will be completed by early 2026.
Prior to this expansion of the relationship, Aaron’s also had operated many of its customer touch points in silos; for example, direct mail operated separately from social media marketing. “We wanted to work on perfecting our targeting and messaging as part of a direct mail test with Zeta, but then we got to looking at whether that has enough interchangeability to give us multi-touch attribution (MTA) versus a last-click look,” said Dodds.
She added that MTA data is vital, noting that when a customer is in a “need” state (the frozen food is melting!) they are likely to only need three to five “touches” prior to making a purchase, versus five to seven for a “want” state (a couch would be more comfortable than these folding chairs!).
“We’re looking to create a dynamic view of where [customers] are in their life stage, as well as how they’re engaging not only with our marketing but also our products throughout their lifecycle, and that becomes fundamental,” said Dodds. “Zeta has been a huge partner in helping us understand how things came to be within the lifecycle of each customer segment, so we can optimize how we speak to the customer and be more relevant.”
A key customer insight for Aaron’s involves the relationship between price and value.. “Customers always say [purchase decisions are] about price, but we’re seeing some customers putting value over price,” said Dodds. “Historically Aaron’s has been very promotion-driven,” which appeals to price-conscious customers, but “now we’re learning how important it is to be very concise in our ‘value’ messaging versus being promo-heavy at the beginning. We talk more about the value of the products themselves.”
Adding New Dimensions to Aaron’s Marketing
Dodds and her team exemplify a “more modern approach” to marketing, according to Ed See, Chief Growth Officer at Zeta Global in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “People think a marketer’s job is to run a campaign, but their job is really to find profitable customers,” he said. “You want to eradicate waste and target your ‘likelies’ so that you’re getting the profitable customer at the top of the funnel.
“Marketers want to know what moves each customer segment: Who do I reach? How do I reach them? and, What the heck do I offer them?,” See added. “With AI that’s super powerful and allows for precision at scale. The question becomes, am I leaving the ‘data breadcrumbs’ so that I know what [these customers] do. That way the CMO and team will know what they need to move to manage penetration by segment and also ensure the customers they land are the profitable customers they want.”
Dodds is equally enthusiastic about the Zeta Global relationship, and sees big things ahead. “This year we’re really just testing, but we definitely have goals for next year, including determining how we amplify to get better reach, continuing to improve the relevancy of the content and meeting the customer where they’re at, across as many channels as possible,” she said. “We’re also looking for improvement of our MTA and MMM [media-mix modeling], better utilization of our spend and continued optimization of cost per acquisition.”
