Turning every OUIGO journey into a personal reason to come back

One campaign, three jobs across the customer base

OUIGO is SNCF's low-cost train brand. Around 25 million people a year ride its no-frills double-decker TGVs and conventional-speed services across France, and increasingly into Belgium and Spain. The brand competes on price against budget airlines, intercity buses, and the family car. The CRM team's job is to take people who've ridden once or twice and turn them into loyal travellers.

Coming into 2026, that job had a clear commercial priority: reactivating mono-buyers and inactive riders, the segments most loyalty programmes write off. But the same January campaign also had to reward the loyal cohort that already kept the programme moving. One creative idea had to land in crowded inboxes, remind every customer of their personal history with OUIGO, and do a different job for each segment it reached.

The Challenge

Personalised retrospectives have gone mainstream. Spotify Wrapped trained customers to expect them. SNCF Connect itself runs one. To stand out, OUIGO knew the campaign had to do more than print a customer's numbers back at them.

The harder part: around 9 in 10 customers in the audience sat in either the inactive or the mono-buyer bucket, the two cohorts traditional promotional emails struggle most to move. The loyal segment was a small minority of the base. One creative idea had to do three different jobs at once:

• Inactive customers: rebuild intent to travel.
• Mono-buyers: convert into a second booking.
• Loyal customers: reward repeat purchase with a thank-you voucher.

The Solution

OUIGO partnered with Seen.io to produce a personalised retrospective video, assembled at the per-customer level. Six personalisation variables drove the film, layered into both the email itself and the film inside it:

• First name: appears on the personalised video thumbnail in the email ("Bonjour Pierre") and in the film's opening beat.
• Number of trips taken with OUIGO: the headline number for the year.
• Total time spent on board OUIGO trains: a softer metric, designed to evoke memory rather than count it.
• Favourite destination: the route the customer travelled most.
• Most recent destination: the last journey they made.
• Preferred ticket option:   Pet, additional luggage, pram, bicycle, OUIGO FULL, OUIGIO PLUS, OUIGOFLEX, etc.

Two cuts of the film ran in parallel. Loyal customers received a version that celebrated history and ended with a €10 voucher valid for a full year, redeemable through December 2026. Mono-buyers and inactive customers received a version focused on re-discovery, with the same retrospective spine but a re-activation pitch in place of the voucher. Every email opened to a personalised landing page, segmented by audience, that played the film in full and showcased a tailored set of destination offers underneath.

Distribution ran through email via Storysuccess in late January 2026.

Results

The campaign cleared OUIGO's CRM benchmarks across every segment, and the loyal cohort delivered the kind of step-change result the team had hoped for from the format.

• Loyal-segment click-through ran nearly 4x OUIGO's 2025 campaign average, landing at 10.7% against a 2.8% baseline. That's a +7.9 percentage point lift on a cohort that already engaged above the rest of the base.
• Overall CTR across the full CRM audience came in more than 1.5x the 2025 baseline, at 4.3% versus 2.8%. A +1.5 percentage point lift across an audience where roughly 9 in 10 recipients sat in cold or one-and-done segments.
• Mono-buyer click-through delivered more than a 50% uplift over the 2025 baseline, at 4.33% against 2.8%. Inactive customers also clicked above baseline at 3.1%, with that segment generating orders OUIGO had historically struggled to extract from dormant riders.
• Loyal-segment conversion per send landed in the high single digits, at 6.17%. OUIGO's CRM team described this in their internal recap as excellent for a single CRM activation.
• Engagement ran deep, not just wide. 69% of visitors who landed played their personalised film, 65% watched it through to the end, and the loyal cohort outperformed both metrics with nearly 9 in 10 plays and around 3 in 4 watched in full.
• 29% of viewers came back to rewatch, averaging 1.6 visits per person. Recipients didn't just watch their film, they returned to it.
• The voucher mechanic delivered a meaningful share of total campaign revenue inside the first seven days, attributable directly to the personalised film.

Why it worked

• Personalisation started in the preview pane. The first-name thumbnail in the email did the open-rate work before the film ever loaded. Recipients saw their own name on a still frame, not a generic header image, and opened at rates approaching 50% across the full base and approaching 60% in the loyal cohort. Once they were in, 45% of all clicks in the campaign landed straight on the video play button. Personalisation didn't start at play, it started at preview, and the film stayed the centre of gravity.
• Six data points, not one. Most personalised emails live or die on first name. OUIGO's film also pulled number of trips, time on board, favourite destination, last destination, and ticket type. The depth is what got the loyal play rate to nearly 9 in 10 once recipients landed, and pulled 29% of viewers back for a second watch.
• One creative idea, three commercial jobs. Reactivation, conversion, and loyalty reward inside the same campaign. The retrospective format is the rare concept that flexes across all three by changing the ask at the end, not the spine.
• The voucher was scoped, not sprayed. Only the loyal cohort received the €10 voucher, and only on the back of a retrospective that earned the right to make the ask. That restraint is what got conversion per send to 6.17%.
• Activation of segments that don't usually respond. The headline number is the loyal cohort's 4x click uplift. The quieter story is the fact that inactive and mono-buyer customers, around 9 in 10 of the audience, clicked above baseline and generated orders at all.

About OUIGO

OUIGO is SNCF's low-cost train brand, launched in 2013. It operates no-frills high-speed TGV services on key French routes (OUIGO Grande Vitesse), a conventional-speed counterpart (OUIGO Train Classique, launched in 2022), and low-cost international routes including Paris to Brussels. Its sister operation, Ouigo España, runs in Spain. OUIGO carries around 25 million passengers a year and competes on price against budget airlines, intercity buses, and private cars. Its CRM programme focuses on building loyalty among price-sensitive and intermittent travellers.