Telecommunications company realizes 20% increase in Conversion Rates

Performance Improvements – Where should ICT Marketing Invest?

Struck by rising costs and shrinking returns from its acquisition programs, a leading
telecommunications firm needed to significantly shift marketing investments to continue
to drive core new customer revenue. Acquisition programs were one of the single
largest areas of marketing investment for the company and it was critical that these
programs continue to drive growth revenue. The company had relied on traditional
direct response tactics including unaddressed admail, newspaper inserts and direct
mail as its primary acquisition methods. However, list wear-out and increased costs
were driving the cost per account to unprofitable levels.

Challenges:

1. They were able to measure the single initiatives, but did not have any way to understand how their tactics worked in tandem.
2. They had limited results and statistics from other types of general media initiatives and campaigns which gave them little confidence these channels could outperform traditional direct response channels
3. They intuitively felt that the acquisition campaigns could somehow benefit from brand awareness initiatives but had no way to quantify the impact.

Solution:

The company implemented a custom pilot with Kneebone designed to answer the
question of how the individual initiatives within their campaigns were performing and
how the initiatives impacted each other. All of the customer’s marketing information
was collected from a 2 year period regarding their campaigns which provided a direct
link to all channels including call centre activity in order to determine which initiatives
were working and which weren’t.

Results:

The client now had a full view of the performance of individual campaigns and the
results of individual initiatives within integrated campaigns. Also, for the first time
ever, they were able to quantify general media and brand programs such as TV,
Radio and Sponsorship.
Based on this information, they constructed a test to validate Kneebone results.
In this test, they compared three types of campaigns – their current acquisition
program vs. on supported with additional direct response investment vs. a fully
integrated campaign with a brand overlay.
In order to payback the incremental media cost for the integrated campaign, a target
ROI was established to achieve a minimum lift of 10 percent to initial response and
a minimum improvement in conversion of 20 percent. Analysts were able to use
Kneebone to run multiple scenarios to determine the optimal investment mix to
confidentially meet these objectives. Now that forecasts were based on historic
results with transparent business judgment, the company’s marketers could clearly
explain the rationale for incremental marketing investment required to support
brand initiatives.

Impact of Kneebone:

• The integrated campaign performed 13 percent higher than forecast, while the control markets performed as planned (within 2% of forecast).
• Client reported that conversion in the integrated campaign climbed 20 percent.
• By adopting the Kneebone technology, the client has a reliable test-and-learn environment with precision analysis and forecasting tools, allowing the marketing team to confidently optimize current programs and obtain increased investments for integrated initiatives to meet objectives.

The Kneebone Engine was deployed to ensure the appropriate ROI was being attributed
to the campaign results and establish business rules for precision budgeting, planning
and forecasting. The proprietary Kneebone time series models were applied to the
data to accurately account for the range of performance in sales funnel conversions –
tracking the results from response, to a lead, to a sale.

Kneebone reporting tools were implemented as a critical component to ensure an
accurate understanding of each campaign. Plus, the Kneebone patented forecasting tools
were integrated into the pilot to enable modeling and scenario planning.