Case Study - Creation Financial Services (now LaSer UK)
Creation Financial Services Ltd (now LaSer UK) moves mobile channel to mainstream cardholder communication status
Final test campaigns with mkodo confirm business benefit of the mobile channel
Overview: Creation Financial Services Ltd (Creation) is a leading retail and consumer credit provider. Under the DUET storecard network, Creation manages the storecards for over 40 UK retail brands such as Adams, Mk One, Faith and JJB Sports. There are approximately 5 million cardholders in the DUET customer database and the card can be used in over 8000 retail outlets in the UK.
Objective: A key focus of Creation's strategy is to gain competitive advantage through provision of their services in an efficient and value-added manner. In this particular campaign, Creation's aim was to drive footfall and encourage spending from existing cardholders. Creation also wanted to take this opportunity to test the capability of SMS as a communication channel to achieve their marketing objectives. In the quest for efficiency, they selected mkodo as their mobile technology enabler; the mkodo product suite provides flexible, at-desktop functionality that can be driven directly by the Creation team.
Solution: Creation designed 7 campaigns in total, each in partnership with a different brand. These were a series of promotional SMS alerts tailored to the individual brands and the mobile database was segmented according to brand demographics.
Campaign messages covered the following events:
- Sales and general discount days in-store
- Communication of loyalty points balance and amount required to trigger a reward
- Cardholder discounts available in-store
mkodo provided consultation services to help define the campaign strategy and use of the mkodo Intelligent Mobile platform (IMP) for setting up and running the broadcasts.
For each campaign the Creation team used the mkodo IMP to upload cardholder mobile numbers to the platform, create the message, schedule the broadcast time, view real time reports and enable the self-managing opt-out process. As the mkodo IMP is a web-based product, full details of the campaign were available to authorized users wherever they had Internet access.
In order to test the effectiveness of the SMS campaign Creation cross-referenced the active brand customers in the last 6 months who were sent the SMS message with the statement against those who did not receive the SMS and compared the spending and visits of the two groups of cardholders.
Outcome: The campaign proved to be a good use and test of SMS as a marketing tool. An impressive uplift in the spending and visits to store was seen for cardholders that received the SMS messages compared to cardholders in the control group. The key findings were:
- The incremental response rate and incremental sale per contract for the SMS activity provided a significant uplift over the control groups of those not contacted or those contacted with traditional marketing methods.
- The ROI was over 600% in several of the campaigns and ranged from 230% to 2852%.
Another interesting finding from the campaign was the number of cardholder service texts received as a result of the broadcast. Although the campaign was not designed to be an interactive campaign (other than for unsubscribes) a number of cardholders did send a message back with cardholder related queries e.g. lost cards, account queries. Creation CRM agents were sent details of these messages immediately from the mkodo IMP and were able to send SMS messages through the platform back to the customers with an appropriate response.
Impressed by the services received from mkodo, Creation has decided to continue this partnership with mkodo and other campaigns are in the planning stages.Along with the traditional marketing communications, mobile messaging has now become a mainstream channel for marketing activities at Creation and future campaigns will look at ways to increase the number of mobile numbers held on the customer database.
Amy Williams, Assistant Planning Manager at Creation commented, "mkodo's solution provides us with a cost effective way of building successful and profitable relationships with and for our customers, and that has to be a good thing. The service was excellent: fast and efficient. They delivered!"
