Improving Customer Relations

The client wished to improve the performance of their CRM (in particular their expensive Direct Mail campaigns) as they moved from focussing on Revenue to focussing on Margin.

They distributed a monthly Direct Mail and this was sent to their entire contact base. When targeting revenue (rather than margin or conversion) additional bookings were achieved almost at any cost. As the company matured and became a target for acquisition, they needed to focus more on the quality of sales acquisition than quantity, and for this project wanted to only target potentially profitable segments of their base.

We built a complete data acquisition platform and brought together all of their data into one place. This data was very disparate - spreadsheets, multiple third party applications, and data spread across other locations. Once this platform was built we were able to appropriately analyse their data.

We then built a customer segmentation model to help them understand their customers more generally (from this a "contact playbook" was produced), and then went on to build an optimised Direct Mail selection algorithm to allow them to target only the most profitable customer groups - and only those who were most likely to be ready to buy now. This algorithm allowed them to reduce their cost of DM by 30% while retaining and improving margin for this channel.