I was chatting with a colleague the other day about how I didn’t think it was right that the FSA was banning self declaration mortgages. At the end of the day if a lender wants to take the risk and the borrower can pay the premium then what’s the problem?
He wasn’t to bothered to be honest, but what he did get animated about was how regulators swing into action on the back of some Daily Mail ‘something has to be done’ type campaign and over react. (yeah I know what you’re thinking, we’re missing having the world Cup to talk about).
“Look how everyone disses direct mail and that some people want that regulated out of existence” chirped up another colleague and this prompted to get some thoughts down on a case study on the power of data I heard recently.
I well networked man from Gartner was speaking at an event I attended recently and he told me a story that illustrates the power of data, what intelligent marketing people can achieve and why spending more on thinking than doing generates greater results.
A UK credit card firm had around 200k customers with varying spending habits and credit profiles. The company’s direct mail team of 3 people used to send them a direct mail piece, twice a year (before Christmas and before the summer holidays). Using some fancy mathematics, that’s around 400k mail pieces per year.
Then they hired someone that understood the power of DM and put in a bit of CRM kit. He hired a few more people that included the obligatory creatives and campaign managers, but most importantly, people that could use the CRM tools to mine the data and find meaningful patterns and customer segments. Combining spending data, demographic and CRM records they could now create focused propositions and campaigns.
Now they still send around 400k pieces each year, but sometimes the campaigns have as few as the Gartner Guy couldn’t tell me too much detail about results, Could have been about confidentiality or because he simply didn’t know, but revenue per client and retention had grown significantly.
The days of broadcast communication having been dying for over 10 years. I think this has been expedited by the global recession, social media, technology and organisations grasping customer experience. But ultimately it is the clever guys like those at our credit card company that will see it off.
He wasn’t to bothered to be honest, but what he did get animated about was how regulators swing into action on the back of some Daily Mail ‘something has to be done’ type campaign and over react. (yeah I know what you’re thinking, we’re missing having the world Cup to talk about).
“Look how everyone disses direct mail and that some people want that regulated out of existence” chirped up another colleague and this prompted to get some thoughts down on a case study on the power of data I heard recently.
I well networked man from Gartner was speaking at an event I attended recently and he told me a story that illustrates the power of data, what intelligent marketing people can achieve and why spending more on thinking than doing generates greater results.
A UK credit card firm had around 200k customers with varying spending habits and credit profiles. The company’s direct mail team of 3 people used to send them a direct mail piece, twice a year (before Christmas and before the summer holidays). Using some fancy mathematics, that’s around 400k mail pieces per year.
Then they hired someone that understood the power of DM and put in a bit of CRM kit. He hired a few more people that included the obligatory creatives and campaign managers, but most importantly, people that could use the CRM tools to mine the data and find meaningful patterns and customer segments. Combining spending data, demographic and CRM records they could now create focused propositions and campaigns.
Now they still send around 400k pieces each year, but sometimes the campaigns have as few as the Gartner Guy couldn’t tell me too much detail about results, Could have been about confidentiality or because he simply didn’t know, but revenue per client and retention had grown significantly.
The days of broadcast communication having been dying for over 10 years. I think this has been expedited by the global recession, social media, technology and organisations grasping customer experience. But ultimately it is the clever guys like those at our credit card company that will see it off.
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