The financial services comparison site is sending 200 million fewer emails but has been able to increase revenue by 12% by targeting customers with more relevant communication.

Price comparison site MoneySuperMarket has flipped its approach “from revenue to relevance” as it puts greater focus on customer experience and driving long-term growth.

The brand had been sending millions of emails to customers each week, regardless of whether they were relevant, which chief customer officer Darren Bentley likens to “throwing enough mud at the wall in the hope some of it sticks”.

Talking at the Festival of Marketing yesterday (11 October), he said: “Our approach to data-driven marketing, our eCRM, was absolutely revenue ahead of customer experience. In 2016, we sent 800 million emails to a pre-GDPR opt-in base of 10 million customers, and each piece of communication was sent to around three million people.

“If we had a particular offer we wanted to promote and we had marketing permission to speak to that customer then that customer was going to receive the offer, regardless of how relevant it was to them individually or whether it was in the context with which they were engaging with the brand.”

If you focus on relevance the revenue tends to follow.
Darren Bentley, MoneySuperMarket
To illustrate the sheer volume of emails the brand was sending, he likens it to trying to have the same conversation with everyone in Milan’s San Siro football stadium.

“Can you imagine talking to everyone in a football stadium and having exactly the same conversation? We were doing that 40 times over and two to three times a week,” he explained.

“The challenge was it was creating revenue; we were hitting our revenue targets but it wasn’t customer-centric. It wasn’t set up to drive long-term engagement and it certainly wasn’t set up to drive long-term retention and we didn’t believe it was a sustainable approach to marketing.”

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.marketingweek.com