ENGAGE MUTUAL ASSURANCE USES SMARTFOCUS TO INCREASE RESPONSE RATES BY 20% engage Mutual Assurance is one of the top 50 largest direct

marketers in Britain. The company provides protection and savings products

both directly and through partners including Asda,

Yorkshire Building Society and Park Row Associates Limited.

Customer

Synopsis

When engage Mutual acquired a prospect pool of 19.4 million people, it needed a way to analyze and manage the data in order to maximize its potential. smartFOCUS’s smartANALYZER provides this, and has cut the time taken to prepare mailing lists from five days to just one day, and with a better understanding of customers and prospects, response rates have been increased by 20%.Challenges and Solutions

The challenge

engage is one of the UK market leaders in ‘Whole of Life’ insurance policies and sells these directly and through its affiliate partners. The policy is available to people aged between 50 and 80 without a medical and pays out on death. The company sends mailings to prospects just before their next birthday, explaining the greater value a savings plan bought todaywill return in comparison to one purchased after their birthday.

When engage Mutual acquired a prospect pool of 19.4 million people, it needed a way to analyze the data and extract targeted mailing lists. It also needed a solution that was capable of managing all of its data in one place, including the prospect pool, the existing customer database, and other data sources such as MOSAIC for demographic profiling.

The solution

engage Mutual uses smartANALYZER to analyze all its data and extract mailing files from the prospect pool. “Because it’s intuitive and we can make changes on the fly, it enables true train of thought analysis,” said Rob Frost, Customer Insight Manager at engage Mutual Assurance. “Our prospect pool is based only on people aged 50-80, we can then compare againstsuppression and exclusion lists, narrow the selection to mainland UK, exclude those who have a policy already, and focus on those who responded to our last communication. If we go too far, we can take a step back again. We can also make sure that we are following, monitoring and constantly revising our contact strategy. It used to take us 10 days to get a mailing to the printers. Using smartANALYZER, we’ve cut five days of preparatory work down to just one day.”

smartFOCUS provided consultancy services to support engage Mutual in building and deploying its initial prospect targeting models. Using smartMODELER, engage Mutual identifies prospects that most closely match the profiles of existing customers. “Using SAS, it would take us one and a half to two weeks to build a model. Now smartMODELER does the hard work for us and builds a model in a tenth of the time. We can then spend more time with the results and test different permutations. This helps us gain a real detailed insight and this is going a long way in helping us improve our acquisition and retention rates.”

smartANALYZER is also providing greater insight into the data than engage Mutual has had before. “Seven million names in the prospect pool have a date of birth,” said Frost. “We can now use smartANALYZER as a planning tool, so that we know we will have 650,000 birthdays in May, for example. We can also quickly investigate variables and judge their data quality. So, for example, the internal marital status field is mostly empty, and the data that is populated is against people we no longer contact. We now know not only not to use this field in selections but we have also informed IT so that they can remove the field from our overnight extracts saving a few precious minutes in refresh time.”

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engage Mutual Assurance

Industry sector

Financial Services

Solution

Intelligent Marketing

Solution components

Data Quality/Management

Single Customer View

Analysis & Visualization

Predictive Modeling

Campaign Management

Email Marketing

Online Execution

Marketing Performance Management

Managed Service

Consultancy Services

Reporting

Cequity's end-to-end suite of integrated services includes customer management consulting, marketing database & information management solutions, analytics, metrics & dashboards and campaign measurement support. Our state-of-the-art technology solution, Cequity ACE is powered by smartFOCUS and is a hosted customer marketing system that can be quickly implemented without major hardware or software investments. This helps us deliver rich yet valuable, information-driven, customer experience opportunities for you.

“From our experience, the Intelligent Analytical Marketing from smartFOCUS makes it possible to instantly analyze, segment, identify and communicate with large volumes of customers and contacts on an individual basis. Intelligent Marketing improves customer communications - throughout the entire lifetime of a company-customer relationship and makes performance driven multi-channel marketing a reality. smartFOCUS is faster and more efficient than we thought it would be!”

CEO - Cequity Solutions

Others in the marketing department have access to the latest data through smartREPORTER (smartANALYZER’s integration with Excel). “Users can process the data using Excel without needing to ask for help from analysts,” said Frost. “This allows non-technical people to run basic profiles and analysis when they want it. This frees up analytical time and is a real win-win situation.” The smartANALYZER Database is updated every night and report generation can also be automated. For the above campaign this gave marketing managers and executives the opportunity to have a bespoke refreshed report on their desktop first thing in the morning.”

smartANALYZER and smartMODELER were implemented in 20 days. “The software is easy to install and administer,” says Frost. “There’s no need for a database administrator and little need for us to bother IT.”

The bottom line

“smartANALYZER has enabled us to be faster and more reactive,” said Frost. “We’re saving about one day a week over all that we would have spent working on data, and which we can now spend on analysis and strategic initiatives. Until we started using smartANALYZER, we couldn’t calculate easily or quickly the average length of a relationship, how many times wewere mailing each person, or whether we could make savings from only mailing each householdonce. By understanding our customers better and improving our targeting, we’ve been able to increase our response rates by 20% in our own-brand direct mailings. When we work with partners like Asda, we can tell them with confidence what kind of response they should expect, so that they can decide whether to proceed. With our Asda branded mailings we’ve been able to bring in a significant amount of new business. It’s been so successful that they have turned what was going to be a one-off into a regular mailing and it now forms a key part of our sales plans going forward.”

About engage Mutual Assurance

engage Mutual Assurance is the sixth largest Friendly Society in the UK. It is a young, modern and progressive 25-year-old organization, based in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. The business employs 180 people, has 340,000 customers and has £647.4 million of total assets. engage Mutual’s mission is to enable people to protect their welfare by providing customers withsimple, accessible, value for money protection and savings products.

About smartFOCUS

smartFOCUS provides software and services that enables companies to manage and coordinate marketing across multiple channels, including email, telemarketing, direct mail and display advertising. The company provides a complete portfolio of data integration, analysis, modeling, campaign planning and management, with integrated budgeting and finance solutions. The result is ‘Intelligent Marketing’, driven by a single view of the customer’s activities across all channels. Marketers can target their communications more accurately, cutting wastage, increasing conversion rates and achieving a better understanding of the customer base.

Users of smartFOCUS’s enterprise marketing management software include AAA, ABN AMRO, Carrefour, EMI, Fig Leaves, Harrods, Hilton International and News International, NSPCC, and T-Mobile.

smartFOCUS is headquartered in Bristol, UK, with offices in the US and continental Europe.

Contact Details

International Offices

“The software is easy to

install and administer,” says Frost.

“There’s no need for a database

administrator

andtle need for us to bother

IT.”

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