Bank enables customer-centric marketing with IBM Campaign

This large Canadian chartered bank manages over USD16 billion in assets. Through highly competitive products and superior personalized services, the company’s focus is on meeting the banking and financial needs of individuals, small and medium-sized businesses and independent financial advisors, through its own distribution networks and independent financial intermediaries. The organization has a number of retail, commercial and brokerage branches, network of automatic banking machines, retail customers and a total of one million clients including commercial.

The challenges
In an effort to introduce a customer-centric corporate culture and marketing strategy, the bank needed to centralize and coordinate all customer decisions so that it could consistently execute treatment strategies across touch points. The bank acknowledged that it was too complex and time-consuming to implement one-to-one marketing, coordinate cross-channel efforts, and deliver timely messages through manual processes and without marketing standards.

Focused on becoming customer-centric and improving the customers’ experience, the bank decided to purchase an Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) solution to enhance its interactions with customers and ultimately deliver coordinated, cross-channel communications that are focused on customers’ interests and needs.

The solution
After evaluating several vendors, the bank selected the IBM® Unica® Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) solution, IBM Campaign. The company chose IBM’s cross-channel campaign and interaction management application to help design, implement, execute, manage, integrate and coordinate a customer-centric contact strategy across marketing channels, branches, direct mail, sales center and email. The bank selected IBM Campaign for its flexibility to use different data sources and its simple, straightforward approach to implementing daily event-triggered communications.

Below are two examples of how the bank is using IBM Campaign today.

Line of credit
In order to acquire new line of credit customers, the bank created a cross-sell campaign targeted at existing customers. The top campaign goal was to make it as easy as possible for customers to open the line of credit, thereby boosting response rates.

Using IBM Campaign, the bank designed a multi-channel, multi-wave interaction strategy. The first step in the campaign was to leverage proprietary segmentation schemes and a propensity model to identify those customers most likely to open a line of credit. Once selected, the company analyzed the information to obtain pre approval amounts for each customer.

As part of the first wave, the company further refined the segments based on pre-approval amounts and behavioral attributes, including products owned, transaction frequency and product usage patterns. After this refinement, the organization sent targeted offers to the customers through direct mail and the inbound call center.

Since the customers were already pre-approved, the bank designed the offers such that customers simply had to sign an agreement to open the line of credit—there was no waiting or approval process required.

The second wave of the campaign focused on customers who did not respond to the first wave. Following three weeks of no-response, the bank used IBM Campaign to execute a “reminder” direct mail piece encouraging customers to review the proposed offer.

In addition to designing and executing the campaign, the company put a closed-loop feedback process in place to capture and track various responses as well as analyze overall campaign effectiveness. The bank captured both direct and indirect responses using IBM Campaign’s built-in response tracking and real-time operational performance reports.

Using IBM Campaign, the bank executed the campaign in two weeks—a 328 percent improvement. Additionally, it increased response rates by 44 percent by enhancing its ability to target and segment and by automating a second wave of the campaign.

Credit limit increase
To ensure the bank’s Visa card became the preferred card in a customer’s wallet, the organization used IBM Campaign to design a multi-wave campaign focused on increasing customer card usage—and additional card requests.

A key challenge in this campaign was the company’s ability to manage the complex segmentation, based on past card usage, and match offer variations with customers to ensure each individual receives the most relevant offer that is also profitable to the bank. With IBM Campaign, the bank managed the large volume of offer permutations and tracks the performance of each against control groups, thereby providing visibility into which offer combinations were most effective with each segment. Prior to IBM Campaign, it was much more difficult and time consuming for the bank to execute this complex campaign. Now the bank can execute the campaign in less than one week—and analyze the results in real time.

The results
IBM Campaign’s ability to coordinate customer communications across channels has helped the bank to improve the productivity, efficiency and measurability of each customer interaction. They have reduced time to market by over 300 percent, enabling the bank to focus on new interaction strategies to further its customer-centric approach. IBM Campaign’s ability to turn customer data into actionable strategies that boost response and return has helped the company to exceed the estimated ROI its investments in data strategies, such as a new data warehouse and data mart. Additionally, they have increased revenues through effective cross-sell and up-sell communication efforts.

For more information
To learn more about IBM Unica products, please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/software/info/unica.

Smarter Commerce: An integrated approach
IBM Unica products are part of the IBM Smarter Commerce initiative. Smarter Commerce is a unique approach that increases the value companies generate for their customers, partners and shareholders in a rapidly changing digital world. To learn more about Smarter Commerce, visit ibm.com/smarterplanet/commerce.