JRE’s Data-Driven Journey to Customer-Centric Marketing

Executive summary

East Japan Railway Company (JRE), the world’s largest passenger railway operator, is transforming its marketing from a railway-centric to a customer-centric model. The company’s mid-term management plan, Move Up 2027, aims to significantly grow revenue from lifestyle services—such as retail, real estate, and hotels—alongside its core transportation business.

To achieve this vision, JRE needed to deeply understand individual customer behavior across both travel and everyday life, and to orchestrate experiences that build long-term relationships. Traditionally, railway companies have treated customers as an anonymous mass, with limited ability to identify individuals or run detailed CRM programs.

JRE changed this paradigm by integrating Suica (Japan’s most widely used transportation-based electronic money, with over 110 million cards issued and acceptance at over 2 million stores) and JRE POINT data (with over 17 million members) into Treasure AI CDP. This created a rich, single-source view of customers that spans offline and online touchpoints—from transit gates and station retail to e-commerce and reservation platforms.

Treasure Data now sits at the core of JRE’s customer-centric data mart, enabling:

• One-to-one communication based on mobility and purchase behavior
• Self-service analytics for frontline teams
• A new ad product, JRE Ads, that activates customer insights across major digital platforms
• Advanced statistical methods—including soft clustering, pLSA (Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis), and survival analysis—to segment customers and predict survival

Key highlights:

• Built a centralized, customer-centric data foundation on Treasure Data CDP, unifying Suica, JRE POINT, and online behavioral data
• Launched personalized email programs that drive incremental station retail revenue and reduce subscriber churn
• Created JRE Ads, an external service that uses CDP data to improve targeting and lower CPA across Google, Meta, LINE, Yahoo, and X
• JRE implemented advanced analytical methods (such as pLSA leveraging the Treasure Data platform), carrying out soft clustering with pLSA and survival analysis to segment customers, tailor content, and precisely predict survival risk

Challenges

JRE generates approximately 70% of its revenue from transportation services, but sees high growth potential in lifestyle businesses such as retail, real estate, hotels, and digital services. To increase the share of revenue from these lifestyle businesses, JRE needed to:

• Move away from viewing “riders” as an undifferentiated mass and instead recognize them as individual customers
• Understand how customers move, shop, and engage across multiple channels and brands
• Deliver relevant, timely communication that would increase engagement, spend, and loyalty across the JRE ecosystem

Unlike airlines—where tickets are directly tied to personal information—railway operators traditionally lacked the data and tools to identify individuals and run robust CRM. JRE’s legacy environment made it difficult to:

• Build a unified customer profile
• Activate insights at scale across marketing channels
• Empower non-technical teams to explore and act on data

To unlock customer-centric growth, JRE needed a modern data foundation and advanced analytics that could support one-to-one engagement at scale.

Solution

JRE adopted Treasure Data CDP as the core of its marketing transformation, linking Suica IDs with JRE POINT membership data to build a unified, customer-centric data mart. This integrates offline behavior such as transit gate passages, in-station purchases, and retail transactions with online behavior like Ekinet reservations and JRE MALL browsing and purchases. With this foundation, JRE can deliver the right information at the right time, improve customer satisfaction, and increase customer lifetime value, realizing Shibuya’s vision of a company that truly understands its customers’ needs.

To scale adoption, JRE built a self-service analysis environment by integrating Treasure Data CDP with BI tools, enabling dashboards for segment creation, campaign testing, and trend analysis. Frontline teams can explore data and insights without deep technical expertise, while Treasure Data Audience Studio supports intuitive segment creation and target extraction without SQL. This democratized access to data ensures that more teams can use insights to drive personalized customer engagement.

With this foundation, JRE launched several high-impact activation use cases:

• Journey-based email programs use Shinkansen reservation data in Treasure Data to send pre-trip messages with personalized recommendations for departure and destination areas, driving station retail sales up, with significant double-digit growth versus non-personalized emails.
• Interest-based JRE POINT usage recommendations classify point usage into nine categories, predict likely uses for each customer, and highlight the top three in newsletters, resulting in higher CTR and CVR and fewer cancellations by avoiding irrelevant content.
• JRE also extended CDP value externally with JRE Ads, combining movement data and purchase history to create high-value audiences for platforms like Google, Meta, LINE, Yahoo, and X, significantly reducing CPA for campaigns such as new condominium promotions.

JRE further refines its customer-centric "Beyond the Border" strategy with advanced analytics in Treasure Data. On JRE MALL, soft clustering with pLSA uses product and store behavior to assign customers probabilistic membership across four clusters (railway, daily goods, character fans, and food/local produce), enabling personalized homepage pop-ups and recommendations that notably boost CTR for key segments. For survival analysis, JRE models when JRE POINT members are likely to cancel, revealing a high-risk period after a specific number of days and different risk patterns based on enrollment channel and direct mail consent. These insights allow the team to predict when individual customers will cross critical survival thresholds, estimate retention over time, and design targeted interventions to sustain engagement and point usage.

Results

By unifying Suica, JRE POINT, and digital touchpoints in Treasure Data CDP and layering advanced analytics on top, JRE has:

• Shifted from railway-centric to customer-centric marketing
• Turned travel and purchase data into actionable insights that drive one-to-one communication
• Increased station retail sales via personalized, journey-based email campaigns
• Improved email engagement while reducing unsubscribe rates through relevance-driven content
• Launched JRE Ads, creating new revenue streams and delivering lower CPA for advertisers
• Deepened customer understanding with soft clustering and survival analysis, enabling more precise segmentation and survival prediction

Future plans

JRE’s work with Treasure Data is laying the foundation for continuously more intelligent, data-driven engagement across its ecosystem.

“We will continue to leverage the diverse customer data accumulated in Treasure Data CDP to advance truly customer-centric marketing,” Shibuya concludes, underscoring JRE’s commitment to ongoing transformation.