Client Challenge

A Fortune-100 client had launched a new, multi-dimensional product aimed at a new customer base, different than that of existing products. As launch approached maturity, the client was challenged with how to shift focus from pure acquisition "at any cost" to efficiency of marketing investment.

Insight

In maturing markets, both high-value and high-growth customers are important.

Solution

Combined revenue and migration models to address customers by their present and future propensity and value. An entirely new customer landscape was created, tiering customers by how much overall value they represent to the company.

Outcome

By targeting high-value tiers, Client was able to reduce marketing spend by 45% while achieving similar sales goals.

Client Challenge

A global producer of consumer and business products determined it would install NPS as an enterprise wide customer advocacy metric, reflecting a shift in business philosophy and organization from a product centered view to a more customer centric approach. The most significant challenges in tying enterprise activities to the NPS metric included marketing and communications. Many metrics were in place, which measured all dimensions of the marketing process, and communications effectiveness. However, none of these measured positive customer engagements.

Insight

The client had already begun an NPS study for its Consumer and Business groups across more than a dozen key international markets. The purpose was to develop baseline NPS scores. However, we were able to analyze and develop further insights from the data in that study. Insights on Customer Engagement gaps, indicators of changing customer attitudes, as well as indicators of performance and motivation, gave clarity that could be leveraged to connect to NPS, and support improvements in customer engagement.

Solution

A survey was developed and targeted to customers who had made recent purchases. The survey encompassed consumer and business products, was translated into 10+ languages and was executed in 16 countries. The survey goals were to gather quantitative NPS type data from customers who made recent purchases; and also to enable qualitative insights into drivers of positive and negative customer recommendations; lastly to leverage quantitative and qualitative insights to connect NPS with existing marketing framework and metrics.

Outcomes

Client NPS scores improved dramatically by 4th Quarter 2011, enabled by many client initiatives as well as insights and improvements from agency efforts. For 2012 planning, clear goals were able to be identified and shared with management and marketing executives, targeting a further 10% improvement in NPS.

Client Challenge

A super-regional bank had a strategic imperative to increase its overall deposits. In accomplishing that goal, it was also important to stay aligned with other key enterprise goals – enhance value of customer relationships and maintain bank profitability. The task was acquiring customers, targeting prospects that had assets to open a new deposit account and who could benefit from a relevant combination of bank products. This presented two major challenges. First, finding prospects with highest propensity to meet these goals; and second, convincing these desirable prospects, that this value proposition was different, and more relevant to them.

Insight

The best customers of the bank were not a homogenous group. Multiple microsegments within top affluent groups comprised the highest propensity targets. Factors including disparity in cost of living in different areas of the region, life stage etc., were highly significant. Prior communications/efforts focused on product features had failed to connect with this segmented affluent consumer strata.

Solution

Advanced modeling techniques were developed and applied to Customer and Prospect databases. Two separate methodologies emerged as most effective in identifying best microsegments from top affluent households. Data analytics yielded key data and insights. A well-briefed creative approach enabled highly relevant and personalized messaging, which spoke to consumers as individuals and successfully connected them with the brand.

Outcomes

The bank achieved or exceeded most of its program goals, including importantly, for deposits.

The upfront effort in targeting, segmentation analytics and insights enabled smaller target groups and superior response rates and results. This made the programs highly cost effective with excellent marketing ROI.

Client Challenge

For their subscription-based service, a Fortune 100 client was focused on elevating per-customer revenue and subscription renewal. Their communications promoted service upgrades and usage-enhancing services/features. Traditional customer segmentation was unable to identify the customers more likely to upgrade. Therefore, all customers received all communications: a cost-prohibitive situation.

Insight

Leveraging multiple criteria to analyze customers at an individual level enabled the creation of a customer continuum for "Propensity to Upgrade," from highest to lowest. The insight derived from the continuum was that the top 40% of customers would provide greater than 88% of service level upgrades.

Solution

A "model of models" was developed, which segmented customers along this continuum. Heightened focus on the top 40% of customers enabled more sophisticated segmentation. Individual status then triggered the most appropriate messaging. "Low Propensity to Upgrade" customers no longer received communications.

Outcomes

Annual sales goals targets were exceeded by 30%. Renewal rates increased 2%. Program costs were reduced significantly. Net result: overall program ROI was substantially increased.

Client Challenge

Global automotive brand was launching a new, ecologically friendly car. Client wanted a truly multi-channel marketing effort to enable consumers to more fully understand the new technology. They also required secrecy. No specs or pictures were provided to agencies. The client instructed its roster agencies to collaborate closely, in order to produce a holistic, cutting-edge, but seamless multi-channel experience.

Insight

Lacking upfront specifications, agency engaged an ongoing Q&A via social media channels to solicit questions from prospective buyers. Over 15,000 questions were submitted. One crucial finding was that real motivations behind buying this type of vehicle were a more complex buyer profile than originally considered. Combining this information with data collected by agency partners, the team developed a marketing plan and creative strategy based on 4 key criteria.

Solution

Social media was a substantial campaign component. Digital marketing was tied to real world events as well, to facilitate dealer visits and test drives, where available. Rigorous analytics on the aggregated information resulted in recommendations to adjust media mix from overwhelmingly digital, and add a larger traditional media component. The creative strategy wrapped all of these inputs into a multichannel and multi-dimensional brand experience.

Outcomes

Within 2 weeks, the new website had over 300,000 unique visits. There were 12,000 sign-ups. Facebook & Twitter garnered 80,000+ fans/followers. The site logged over 20,000 online reservations. As a result of the multi-channel marketing effort, the new model sold its entire first year production shortly after becoming available to dealerships.

Client Challenge

A leading telecom provider had aggressively invested in infrastructure; as a result, their TV subscriber base initially grew rapidly. But as system build reached maturity, new customer acquisition plateaued. With a now-substantial customer base, the price of customer attrition was two-pronged: loss of revenue, and heavier incremental acquisition expense to replace lost customers. The priority shifted towards maintaining loyal customers, especially high-value customers.

Insight

A combination of customer data analysis and primary research revealed that rarely was it one big event that led to cancellation; multiple unaddressed customer frustrations precipitated a "last straw" moment.

Solution

A multi-dimensional, customer journey-based retention strategy was developed with three components: First, for the highest-churn period (first 90 days), an educational welcome process. Second, triggered communications based on stated customer complaints. Third, a propensity to churn model was developed, which triggered feature-and-benefits communications and enabled preferred offers to retain high-value customers.

Outcomes

The success attributed directly to this retention strategy resulted in over $20 million in revenue saved within the first calendar year. The lion's share came from higher value customers.

Client Challenge

A NASDAQ 100 technology brand today was a focused and fast-growing company on the rise in 2002. Their rise up to then had been driven by strategic focus and technology innovation. Marketing efforts were predominately centered around mass communications to build brand and to emphasize product features and superiority. In addition, there were efforts for broadly targeted (direct and email) customer acquisition. Client executives then began a steady migration towards more customer focused and direct communications, as well as towards digital as primary media channel. The new belief was that continued revenue growth would require more targeted acquisition and ongoing 2-way customer communications. Building customer loyalty and increasing share of customers would be crucial to continued growth.

Insight

Key insights began first with the obvious point that core key customers were a relatively small group of highly tech savvy individuals. The importance of these customers extended well beyond sales. Understanding the goals, needs and challenges of this group is crucial to product success, and their insights an invaluable source for ongoing product development. Their media consumption steered heavily towards digital. Second, the client's internal organization was structured along product lines. This often resulted in messaging overload, and missed opportunities for offering appropriate multi-product solutions to customers/prospects, based on a deeper understanding of their needs.

Solution

Client communications become steadily more segmented, sophisticated and targeted. Enablement of two-way communications resulted in valuable customer input and insights. That assisted in improving the relevance of every message, and continuous improvement in understanding customer needs. Targeted emails, e-newsletters, web content, social media and digital advertising were employed increasingly as the smart and effective channels for acquisition and enhanced customer relationships. Information sharing, education, launch announcements, etc., via digital communications became a key driver of product revenue, cross-sell and upsell. This approach focused more on maintaining loyal customers through product upgrade cycles and new product introductions.

Strategic client (product) acquisitions were also quickly integrated into this framework.

Outcomes

Client enterprise revenue growth has continued at almost 20% per year. This achievement reflects strategic acquisitions, in addition to the improvement in marketing effectiveness, to be sure. The integrated partnership between client and agencies has more directly helped to drive substantial increases in revenue per customer and in customer loyalty. The latter metrics have been crucial contributors to the sustained revenue growth.

Client Challenge

Our client, a premier brand, wanted a valid measurement of the lifetime value of both new and existing customers versus the cost expended to acquire and grow them. In addition, the client was increasingly adding and emphasizing information and metrics which were customer focused, and drove improved customer knowledge. Traditional cost per click, response, and sales analyses provided client with a product only ROI focus. Ideally, the new metric would also inform which campaigns were most and least effective in acquiring and growing more valuable customers, in a cost-effective manner.

Insight

Product focused marketing had been mostly focused on gross customer additions. But high churn was an ongoing and problematic issue, always diluting new revenue gains. The belief was that rapid new customer turnover adversely skewed total churn. CLV-based metrics and insight could be leveraged both in targeting direct acquisition marketing efforts towards higher value prospects, and also to identify and prioritize, upsell and cross-sell opportunities among existing customers, to realize their higher potential CLV.

Solution

Agreement was attained on a new uniform "comparable metric" for CLV. Standard formulae were developed for consistent transformation of discordant client marketing data to the new comparable metric. This enabled stack ranking of all marketing investments, based on results and CLV potential for future return. Decision support tools were developed and weekly interdepartmental scorecard meetings were instituted by the client to provide ongoing discussion, insights and framework for optimization.

Outcomes

In less than 5 years, with a flat or decreased marketing budget, client results improved by better than 80%. Client maintained its existing metrics, which were tailored for specific needs of the product groups and business units. The addition of standardized and comparable CLV provided new valuable, actionable insights for all groups and enhanced customer intelligence. Across the organization it proved possible to maintain or lower marketing budgets and simultaneously increase marketing-driven CLV.

Client Challenge

A global telecom brand wanted to significantly improve tracking and evaluation of marketing spend across its SBU's, and across all media and marketing categories, to provide accurate information for consideration in its marketing investment decisions. Existing methods generated substantial amounts of program data, measured through hundreds of discordant success metrics. This made it impossible to compare and analyze investments across the enterprise. Client executives wanted the ability to link program spend to sales generated, and/or some other comparable metric for ROI.

Insight

Different categories of marketing investment spend - brand, product, promotion, direct, sponsorships, etc. - impact consumer purchase behaviors in different ways, and over very different time frames. Each category of spend produces its own effect on brand health and sales. In addition, each can have a spill-over or "halo effect", providing lift to other categories and campaigns. These interactions and synergies, along with numerous other variables, need to be well understood to develop an accurate and holistic comparable metric that can cross all categories of spend. And to provide empirical basis for marketing investment decisions.

Solution

Developed a 'Total Stimulation' approach, including both direct (results directly attributable to medium) and indirect (effect of one medium on other media) impact. This entailed evaluation of massive amounts of aggregated data from across the client enterprise, from a span of several years. The approach had to be holistic (cross product, cross SBU), integrated (deliver insights on impact of changes in media allocations tied to business metrics) and scalable (repeatable for new data without big incremental work). Dozens of interconnected models were developed to balance short, medium, and long-term marketing investments, and to quantify "halo effect."

Outcomes

Since this new approach was installed, marketing portfolio ROI has more than doubled. Further enhancements to the approach include a Scenario Planning tool – i.e. where to add next $1MM for maximum results; or where to cut $1MM of spend with minimum impact on results; and unified management tools for A/B decisions, predictions, forecasts, analysis and insight, etc. Client has validated and expanded use of this model several times since its inception.

Client Challenge

A leading national network of grocery retailers launched multi-channel customer loyalty programs for its four top-performing store brands. Program objectives included rewarding best customers and incentivizing both purchase behavior and frequency of store visits. However, the programs struggled initially with lower than expected response rates and sales impact. Additionally, each store brand had separately developed content, driving up program costs. The client sought ways to improve these programs for their best customers.

Insight

The loyalty programs leveraged a "one-size-fits-all" approach. While communications were focused primarily on incentivizing shoppers to spend, the offers were not tied to individual customer data. Communications also did not provide relevant information beyond generic coupons and the creative was pedestrian. To enable more personalized offers and timely, relevant messaging to individual shoppers, the client needed to better leverage existing customer data for actionable insights.

Solution

The client and roster agencies collaborated to revamp the loyalty programs, leveraging email, web, and print. A crucial starting effort was integration of the coupon system, customer database and our proprietary email platform. "Customer personas" connected shopper history with household demographics, customer preferences, etc., and enabled individual shoppers to receive offers for their preferred products. These were redeemable at the store brand/location they frequented most. A newly inspired creative approach elevated customer engagement. Program communications were then expanded to include other CRM-type messaging, such as a "Welcome" at enrollment, and "fast track" time-sensitive messages such as availability of favorite seasonal, specialty food items, etc. Finally, several steps were implemented to automate and streamline the entire process. A Content Management System was developed so creative assets could be shared across store brands and marketing channels, and content generated dynamically in emails. Triggers enabled automated welcome and "fast-track" messages.

Outcomes

The programs achieved over 120% of their sales goals, as well as an increase in activations. Automation and streamlining of communications also yielded significant time and cost savings. Most importantly, the customer experience for loyal shoppers was greatly enhanced through fresh and engaging creative and the personalization of offers and informational messaging.