Summary
At the start of 2010 Lombard embarked on a journey to revitalise its brand and proposition. Despite being market dominant within the asset finance space market research from customers, prospects and the wider financial community indicated there was still a lot of work to do if was to cement and further strengthen its position. Add to this a tough economic climate and a tentative customer mindset and Lombard were facing a very steep challenge – one it had little choice but to face.
A central part of the strategies success was hooked around the retention and reinvigoration of its existing customer base. Long term strategic partner and digital specialist Purestone were brought in to shape and deliver a sustained 12 month online engagement programme. With education, interactivity and the principle of the ‘personal customer journey’ at its heart Purestone implemented a multi layered campaigns strategy spanning email, web and online applications.
The results have been consistently exceptional. Careful segmentation of the 40,000 strong customer database gave rise to key insights to help support and drive email campaigns that delivered unique open rates of 43 per cent. Click through rates of 25 per cent+ across campaign microsites and applications saw a customer conversion rate of 12 per cent.
About the client company
Lombard is part of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group, one of the world’s largest financial services organisations.
Within the group Lombard’s business is asset finance. Its founders started hiring out rolling stock to the railways in 1861. Today, it maintains this forward looking entrepreneurial approach – helping businesses of all sizes obtain the vehicles, vessels, aircraft, machinery or technology they need.
Strategy – the bigger issues
The why before the how – Education & understanding
When a lot of businesses require additional funding to support growth or simply survive the default position is to look to the banks for help. In some instances privately raised capital. This mindset and scenario forms one of Lombard’s major challenges, even existing customers don’t naturally think of asset finance as a viable solution to their funding needs. Therefore how do we break into the decision making process and ensure asset finance is a considered solution?
Once we establish asset finance as a viable option we need to help people to understand it. How do we delayer the asset finance proposition? Make it digestible and relevant to the individual and their needs.
The final part of the challenge was to ensure that once asset finance was established and understood Lombard were the provider of choice. In line with the rest of the strategy we needed to make its proposition and USP’s clear, concise and engaging.
A faceless organisation
Lombard prides itself on its people. Expertise and specialist knowledge forms a major part of why it’s maintained a position as the UK’s leading provider of asset finance. The bottom line is they have an asset specialist to work one on one, at a local level with a customer and help them navigate through what can be critical, business defining decisions. In reality is this communicated to Lombard customers? Partially. Some customers will wax lyrical about Lombard’s personal touch others will describe them as a faceless, financial giant. Therefore we needed to bring to forefront of the customer conversation the face(s) of Lombard, to remind customers that they were working with real people at a local level who cared about their business.
Objectives of the campaign
The eCRM based retention campaign was designed to deliver a set of joined up, highly personalised, relevant and straight forward customer conversations. In order to demystify the Lombard offering and at a wider level asset finance it was imperative to keep the campaign direct and simplistic. Once we established an initial level of engagement through the first wave of communications we wanted to build on this, extending the conversation and asking for more of the customers in terms of calls to action and interaction. Once we could establish a one-to-one customer engagement we’d have the ability to build rapport through the channel which in turn would enhance Lombard’s wider dealings within the customer base. The sales teams would feel the benefit of the communications as the customer base ‘warmed up’ which would be directly translated to bottom line benefits.
The target audience
Who are we talking to?
- 40,000 existing customers.
- SME’s (1-1000 employees).
- UK wide.
- Financial decision makers (owners, FD’s, procurement).
- 60 per cent of the customer base were made up of customers who had only ever used Lombard’s vehicle financing products. Historically this has been Lombard’s bread and butter in terms of revenue generation and whilst we still needed to maintain this line of business we also needed to re-educate these customers around the wider offering i.e. we don’t just finance cars!
Media, channels or techniques used
- Email: Ability to intelligently use customer data to reinforce the ‘personal’ touch and deliver a one-to-one engagement that built over time between the relevant Lombard sales representative and their customer. Split testing with immediate results allowed rapid evolution of campaign creative to ultimately drive recipients to clickthrough to campaign microsites.
- Microsites: Used as tools to convert the conversation, providing a dedicated and defined end point to the customer journey with a heavy emphasis on the calls to action. In the background the customer data followed the conversation to the microsite allowing tailored content to be served. All interactions were tracked, recorded and fed back immediately to the business for follow up and to inform future campaigns.
Timescales of the campaign
The campaign spanned 12 months of activity with one major campaign release each quarter. Starting April 2010 – April 2011.
- Q1 focussed around Lombard’s capital expenditure proposition; geared towards education and awareness around asset finance as a viable funding solution.
- Q2 centred on vehicle asset finance products deliberately timed to coincide with the launch of new vehicle registrations.
- Following on from Q1’s ‘Capex’ campaign Q3 extended the ‘value added’ and educational conversation with a campaign dedicated to helping customers navigate through the implications of the national budget.
- Q4 evolved Q2’s activity with a follow up on the vehicle expenditure theme this time, based on the previous three quarters of highly targeted and relevant campaigning asked for interaction from customers through the route planner questionnaire.
All campaign activity was plotted against segmented customer data sets with logic built into the frequency of communications to ensure there was no saturation of the data. Splinter campaigns ran alongside mainstay activity capitalising on niche behaviours from within pockets of the data. These supported and drove footfall/registration for customer events, exhibitions and trade shows.
360 degree reporting ran continuously throughout the duration of the campaign with four key ‘wash up’ sessions to isolate insight, learnings and feedback from the business.
‘The Route Planner’ interactive questionnaire provided a huge amount of customer insight that was used across the full marketing mix as well as informing 2011 ecampaign activity.
Client testimonial
“Having not truly implemented an online customer engagement programme before, we were keen to roll out a strategy that was unique and one that would rejuvenate customer conversation. It was also important that the campaign was designed in such a way that it was befitting of the newly launched Lombard brand.
We are delighted with the results of the campaign which far outweighed our expectations and with the help of Purestone we have started to build real and positive customer relations through the online channel. Not only has this strengthened relationships, it has directly translated to the bottom line.” Nick Moody, retention & acquisition manager, UK Lombard
