BPM uses email to re-engage customers

Banca Popolare di Milano SpA (BPM) has been part of the Banco BPM Group since January 1, 2017, and has become the third largest banking group in Italy thanks to its merger with Banco Popolare. BPM has a network of about 700 branches spread throughout the country, particularly concentrated in and around Milan.

50.35 %

Unique openings

+ 23 %

Rise in unique openings

29 %

Unique clicks

- 33 %

Churn rate*

* Indicator measuring lost customers in a given period.

Paolo Debernardi

Advanced Analytics and Campaign Manager, Banco BPM

MailUp proved to be a flexible and responsive contact who was dedicated to our needs, enabling us to manage a whole host of activities: generating and collecting leads, creating workflows to send triggered communications, self-profiling pages and much more.

To optimize its customer loyalty strategy, BPM needed to assess each user’s level of engagement and monitor disused and inactive email addresses in order to boost its open and click-through rates in its subsequent campaigns.

This led to the need to develop a targeted campaign that is not bound by a commercial offer, with the aim to:
  • Collect data to diversify future mailings
  • Retain customers with targeted action, beyond commercial approaches
  • Identify and re-engage inactive contacts, increasing interaction.
BPM determined that birthdays were the best time in the customer lifecycle to make inroads with the customer. Its strategy involved sending a Happy Birthday email with the option to select a gift after filling out a form.Here are the four phases of the campaign:
  1. the Happy Birthday email is sent, which contains a clear call to action that sends recipients to a self-profiling form created using the BEE editor, having received the customer’s proper authorization;
  2. the data entered by each customer in the self-profiling form is collected and the gift is selected based on their own interest;
  3. a triggered confirmation email is sent once the gift has been chosen;
  4. clusters (groups of recipients) are created following a segmentation of the database, which is updated with the new data collected.

Results

BPM’s strategy paid off, achieving rates well above industry averages for Banking & Finance: unique openings at 50.35% against 14.4%, and unique clicks at 29% against 14.5% (source: MailUp’s Statistical Observatory 2016).The net increase in performance had a direct impact on the churn rate (-33%): the indicator expressing the percentage of customers who abandon a service compared to the total number of active customers.While in terms of database segmentation and profiling, the channel proved essential in integrating the analytical information from email marketing together with the information on the customer’s banking behavior: whenever necessary, BPM can develop models to create profiled communications based on each customer’s individual characteristics.
Results

Best Practices

Put in place a strategy that rewards customers and, at the same time, allows you to collect new and up-to-date information on them.

Create a self-profiling form with the drag & drop BEE editor to allow recipients to complete or update their profile.

Carry out segmentation on the new data collected to create profiled mailing groups and make your subsequent campaigns even more effective.

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