Inforte Drives Marketing Measurement For Financial Services Firm

Company Background

Our client is a sub-prime mortgage lender in the residential space. As a wholesaler, this client competes for borrowers through mortgage brokers across the United States. Leveraging a sales force of over 400 people; a marketing department that uses fax, voice mail, direct marketing and e-mail marketing as communication channels; and three service centers across the country, our client has aggressively become one of the top 10 sub-prime lenders in the United States in just six years.

Business Issue

Selling its product to a national network of mortgage brokers through more than 400 sales representatives, our client needed to break through the competitive clutter to articulate its unique value to brokers. Complicating the effort further, the lender needed to reach the end consumer, the borrower, as well as the broker in between.

To reach its customers, our client leveraged multiple channels including direct mail, e-mail, voice mail, fax, a direct sales force and advertising. Though the campaigns were creative and innovative, leveraging various sweepstakes and rewards, the same campaign used multiple channels to reach the same organizations, prospects and customers. Given this, it was difficult to measure the effectiveness of any one campaign and then focus on the most effective way to increase the profitability of its marketing investments.

To effectively manage their marketing investments, the company had to address some significant challenges:

• Information across customer service, sales and operations resided in disparate systems making it difficult to match sales and customers across channels.
• Disparate customer information stores meant that prospects, customers and contacts were duplicated across and within systems.
• Marketing processes did not enforce campaign design standards, which made it difficult to capture promotion history and match sales and customers.

Inforte's Solution

The customer turned to Inforte based on its leadership in providing its Global 1000 clients with insight, intelligence and an infrastructure for fact-based decision making, along with enterprise-wide customer intelligence solutions that enable data-driven strategy across the organization.

Inforte worked with this financial services firm to develop strategies and processes to evaluate and enhance its Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI). Aligning with the marketing organization, the Inforte team first developed business rules regarding customer identification, campaign responses and customer impact, and then analyzed existing customer information systems, data quality issues and integration challenges.

With the business rules in place and the analysis of current issues complete, the team focused on the following critical project deliverables:

• Creating a single, integrated and cleansed marketing database that contains campaign, customer, product, promotion history, segmentation and activity information.
• Cleansing and de-duping customer information in order to accurately market and evaluate campaigns.
• Developing direct and implied response algorithms to understand marketing effectiveness.
• Building algorithms to follow their customers through their lifecycle: prospect, customer, inactive and re-engage.
• Generating a series of management reports for executives and campaign managers to evaluate marketing, campaign and customer performance.
• Crafting an environment for marketing analysts to perform adhoc and exploratory analyses.

Business Benefits Delivered

The project provided our client with the critical capability to test new marketing strategies, evaluate the results and make quick marketing investment decisions. By continually understanding its ROMI, the client can vary its marketing programs, react to market conditions, drive sales, and increase customer and marketing program profitability through sharp targeting.

Specifically, the project provided the marketing team with several enhanced customer intelligence tools:

• A series of management reports that quickly evaluates marketing campaign performance including: customer, prospect and inactive conversion; graphical dashboards for campaign conversion; sales conversions; marketing event performance; and campaign lift.
• An environment where customer and prospect research can be performed and evaluated to help develop new campaign ideas and marketing tactics.
• A customer value model that evaluates and ranks customers across regions, across the sales force and across the company. The customer value model leverages 42 different attributes to understand customer performance and helps direct sales and marketing investments in customers.
• A marketing process that helps standardize campaign design to ensure that each campaign can be measured.

Words of Advice

Moving from a mass marketing strategy to a more direct, targeted strategy is an extremely large change for many organizations. From both strategic and marketing process standpoints, organizations will find resistance to concepts like "not mailing to everyone," "not every customer provides the same value," and market testing to research the value of a new idea.

By putting the analytical infrastructure and marketing process in place, organizations can scale from mass marketing to direct marketing at their own pace. Many organizations will start out slowly, and then move to the new paradigm quickly as the profitability of the programs and usefulness of the insight gains momentum and mindshare within the organization.