Customer Journey definition
and implementation of Segmentation in a Financial Institute
Carolina de Moura Freire
Project Work report presented as partial requirement for
obtaining the Master Degree Program in Data-Driven
Marketing
Title: Customer Journey definition and implementation of Segmentation in a Financial Institute
Subtitle:
Student: Carolina Nastassia de Moura
Freire MDDM
2022
NOVA Information Management School
Instituto Superior de Estatística e Gestão de Informação Universidade Nova de Lisboa
CUSTOMER JOURNEY DEFINITION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF SEGMENTATION
IN A FINANCIAL INSTITUTE
by
Carolina Freire
Project Work report presented as partial requirement for obtaining the Master Degree Program in Data-Driven Marketing
DEDICATION
Thank you to:
Universidade Nova for the opportunity to join the Master in Data Driven Marketing;
The teachers who taught, advised and guided me during these 2 years;
Prof.ª Diana Orghian for monitoring and help me with my Thesis;
My mother Stella, my father Hugo, my brother Henrique, my grandmother Henriqueta and my boyfriend Gonçalo, who never stopped supporting and motivating me, specially this past months;
Thank you all – your feedback, suggestions and availability were fundamental to the project’s realization.
ABSTRACT
Financial Institutions are facing a lot of disruptions driven by a world which became digital.
Many banks already understand that they need to invest if they want significant transformation and reinforce strategies to adapt to global trends. It’s no longer enough for companies to compete only over prices, services, products, last models, etc – but the way how they do it’s starting to be as important as what it delivers – which content should companies present to which clients? All the steps of this project will help to build a stronger customer loyalty and personalized marketing strategies for this financial services institute and will try to help them to increase product and offers awareness and thus increase sales.
KEYWORDS
Customer Journey; Segmentation; Personas; Customer Experience; Pain Points; Customer Knowledge; Marketing Campaigns
INDEX
1. INTRODUCTION ... 7
2. COMPANY ... 8
3. PROBLEM AND HOW TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM ... 9
4. DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN FINANCIAL SERVICES ... 10
5. DEFINING THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY ... 11
6. SEGMENTATION ... 13
7. PAIN POINTS ... 16
8. PERSONAS ... 20
9. PROCESS FOR SENDING A PERSONALIZED COMMUNICATION ... 23
10. EMAIL TEMPLATES ... 24
11. RESULTS ... 27
12. CONCLUSION ... 30
13. Bibliography ... 31
14. Web Refferences ... 32
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2 - Smaply Project ..……….……….………….. 9
Figure 3 - Segmentation Framework ... 14
Figure 4 - Screenshot of the Scorecard ... 16
Figure 5 - Average Scores ………... 17
Figure 6: Quantitative Survey: Consumer Profile_Demography ……… 17
Figure 7: Quantitative Survey: Consumer Profile_DemographyResidence ……… 18
Figure 8: Quantitative Survey: Consumer Profile_Education and Professional Activity.. 18
Figure 9 - Ranking of Consumers Pain Points... 19
Figure 10 - Personas Categories ... 20
Figure 11 – Decision Tree ………..……… 20
Figure 12 - Personas Card Model sent by HQ... 21
Figure 13 - Personas Card Model replicated for Portugal (Budget Driven High) ... 22
Figure 14 - Budget Segment Template ... 24
Figure 15 - Mixed Segment Template ... 25
Figure 16 - Car Model-Driven Segment Template ... 26
Figure 17 - 3 Types of Segmentation applied ... 27
Figure 18 - Results ... 27
Figure 19 - Results of Buget Segment ... 28
Figure 20 - Results of Car-Model Segment ... 29
1. INTRODUCTION
As a result of my choice to do a master’s in Data-Driven Marketing, with specialization in Marketing Intelligence, at NOVA IMS, I started an Internship in Customer Experience at RCI Bank and Services. To fulfill the Masters, I will conduct a Project - the purpose of this (proposal) report is the construction of a strategy and implementation of a Customer Journey, and further, the Segmentation and creation of Personas – with the final objective of implement strategic marketing techniques.
This internship is focused on practices related to the management of Digital, Marketing and CRM activities, as well as participation in activity planning with the objective of continuous improvement in the acquisition of leads and loyalty of customers – so, of course, this project is very important to implement.
In the final Report, I propose to address the following points:
1. Characterization of the Company 2. Problem
3. How to solve the problem 4. Theory - Digital Transformation 5. Define Strategy to Implement 6. Define Customer Journey 7. Pain Points
7. Implement the CJ on SMAPLY 8. Usage of Segmentation
9. Application of results on Email Marketing Campaigns 9. Bibliography
2. COMPANY
RCI Bank & Services is the financial services provider for Renault Group brands Renault, Dacia, Alpine, Renault Samsung Motors and Lada, and for the Nissan Group brands Nissan, Datsun and Infiniti and Mitsubishi Motors. RCI offer finance and services addressing all their customers, individuals, and businesses, buying new and used cars and commercial vehicles. Present in 36 countries, contributed to the growth of the Alliance brands. In 2020, financed the purchase of nearly 1.5 million vehicles.
RCI’s purpose is to serve as a strategic lever for the Alliance brands. By factoring in the specific characteristics of each brand and planning for emerging automobility challenges, they partner them in their sales policies, which seek to win over new customers and earn lasting loyalty.
In Portugal, RCI represents 3 brands: Renault, Dacia and Nissan – in 2021, RCI was the financial intermediary of:
• 35,8% of all Renault cars matriculated
• 40,5% of all Dacia cars matriculated
• 23,7% of all Nissan cars matriculated.
Figure 1: Logos of the brands
3. PROBLEM AND HOW TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM
Customer Experience has become a vital tool in the strategy of organizations to obtain a sustained competitive advantage, both in strategic positioning and in operational efficiency.
With the never-ending evolution of patterns of purchase, consumption, and commercial offer, using new technologies, the development of digital marketing and Personalized offers are used as a tool of competitive advantage. This evolution brings with it a profound change in the way how companies approach the market.
Since RCI Bank & Services in Portugal need to report directly to France (Headquarters), we must attend to their proposed objectives every year, and digitalization has become, in the past years, a huge priority to facilitate processes and increase the speed of internal actions. In this way, it was proposed to implement the local Customer Journey and Personas, with the objective of having a major Segmentation of the customer portfolio on CRM, so that marketing campaigns are personalized to the clients, while also being able to see the Pain Points that the customers face and act on them to turn the Customer Journey smoother.
We all have a journey with a brand. And the way we relate to each other as a brand can be predicted in the different stages of the sales funnel, making each company have an action plan to achieve the goal of each stage (Stages: Awareness, Research, Evaluation, Purchase/Subscription, Loyalty). The problem that currently exists and that I am trying to solve is the lack of a visual and palpable customer journey in this company, where it will be possible to observe all stages of the sales funnel, from prospect to customer, and developing the last step - customer loyalty, where I will define personalized campaigns for each type of customers (personas) for renewal opportunities.
The tool that is going to be used to create the Customer Journey is SMAPLY and already exists in other branches across the world, and they are all success cases.
Figure 2: Smaply Project
4. DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN FINANCIAL SERVICES
In today’s world, there is no doubt that customer knowledge has changed the way people relate to companies and brands. In some ways, customer experience has become a digital focus group for businesses everywhere — 24/7, always on. Consumers are displaying a strong need for personalized attention and, in RCI’s case, financial education—and banks and financial institutes are in the perfect position to provide it. Empowered with quality financial education, consumers can take control of their finances, make more informed decisions, and, eventually, realize their financial potential.
Financial Institutions are facing a lot of disruptions driven by a world which became digital.
All consumers have high expectations towards Customer Service and banks should also keep tracking this technology advances and invest in them. This digital revolution is a very complex workforce, and this transition may not be smooth, but humans and digital labor can work alongside and get objectives done more effectively.
Many banks already understand that they need to invest if they want significant transformation and reinforce strategies to adapt to global trends (PwC, “Top financial services issues of 2018), in line with their company’s core mission – because users/clients expect a properly experience from their financial institutions.
But, even if companies already invested in technology to obtain data (client segmentation, for example), that data needs to be analyzed to reach conclusions. We cannot gain insights from data on client behavior if it is spread across the company in disconnected departments or databases.
From my experience, this Customer Journey, and data that we are going to capture with it belongs to one of the most important aspects– the concept of listening the customers. It’s about monitoring our clients/future leads perceptions, moods, pains, behaviors and anticipate a rational and optimal solution.
All the steps of this project will help to build a stronger customer loyalty and personalized marketing strategies for this financial institute, will help them to increase product and offers awareness and increase sales.
5. DEFINING THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Customers expect high levels of satisfaction of their needs. All companies should give an optimal customer experience to keep clients satisfied – not only in delivering the product/service, but also all the after-sales process. In fact, ‘’more than half of the companies in a given sector maintain a goal of delivering the best customer experience in their industry within the next 3 years’’ (Stone et al., 2013). RCI Bank and Services is not an exception.
It’s no longer enough for companies to compete only over prices, services, products, last models, etc – but the way how they do it’s starting to be as important as what it delivers (Duncan et al., 2016).
As I said before, the way people interact with a brand can be predicted. These interactions anchored around a specific need are called a “Customer Journey’’ (Stone et al., 2013) – This is a framework that visually demonstrate and allows a company to organize itself and mobilize employees to deliver value to customers consistently, in line with its purpose (Duncan et al., 2016).
The different stages of the Customer Journey are represented as a sales funnel with different stages:
Awareness, Research, Evaluation, Purchase/Subscription and Loyalty.
Improving customer experience is not easy. It requires changes and never-ending developments and upgrades in customer loyalty and value – it’s like trying to create a personal connection between the company and the customer. Most organizations still tend to underestimate the importance of the internal cultural changes needed to achieve and sustain a new approach to the customer experience.
(Duncan et al., 2016).
When enterprises define their Customer Journey, they must evaluate their organizational and frontline DNA, and give special attention to the customer voice during the different stages. This action might require changes in the actual operating culture and in the overall organization structure (Stone et al., 2013). Basically, the company must be open to the possibility of adapting and changing the environment in which it has always operated.
This means that improving the customer experience not only requires fast action towards resolving a problem from the present but also changing habits, work manners and behaviors to anticipate the future.
First, the customer journey mapping process requires five steps (Temkim, 2010):
1. Collect internal insights;
2. Develop initial hypotheses;
3. Research customer processes, needs, and perceptions;
4. Analyze customer research;
5. Map the customer journey;
The final step, mapping the Customer Journey, includes not only all the touchpoints between the company and their customers, but also other six actions are critical to map and manage it (Duncan et al., 2016):
1. Identify the nature of the journey’s customers take—from the customer’s point of view – Customer Journey ‘’as is’’
2. Understand how customers navigate across the touchpoints as they move through the journey;
3. Anticipate the customer’s needs, expectations, and desires during each part of the journey;
4. Build an understanding of what is working and what is not (Pain Points);
5. Set priorities for the most important gaps and opportunities to improve the journey;
6. Come to grips with fixing root-cause issues and redesigning the journeys for a better end-to-end experience.
Now, from RCI’s point of view, I will have to:
1. Develop a global vision of RCI and vehicle financing to tackle key challenges and break down the main stakes before, during and after the contract;
2. Define touchpoints for each step of the journey to improve communication strategy;
3. Understand customers motivations and expectations with quantitative and qualitative studies;
4. Identify market trends and insights regarding vehicle financing;
5. Understand RCI customers’ pain points and compare them with competitors to identify critical ones;
6. Design solutions to be implemented in order to get a smoother customer journey;
The objective is also to build ideal-type profiles (personas) by gaining valuable insights on customer profiles, behaviors, and motivations, and then, personalize communications and reach customers at the right time to improve engagement and build stronger relations. All of this, to develop tailored offers on products and services to increase conversion rate and revenues.
Companies face innumerous advantages in defining their Customer Journey:
1. With the mapping of positive and negative feelings during the journey, it is possible to develop actions to eliminate the negative ones and enhance and learn from the positive ones, taking this to process improvements and transformations from the customer’s perspective;
2. Looking to the negative feelings and act on them, improving the actions on that stage, will increase customer satisfaction, by removing the pain points - > experience tell me that when we remove a customer’s problem and the customer experience is positive, besides being happy, the customer will tend to continue doing business.
3. If customers continue to do business with us because they’re satisfied with the service,
6. SEGMENTATION
Market segmentation is one of the key determinants of successful marketing and is fundamental to the matching process between customers’ wants and needs and the supplying organization’s ability to satisfy. Having a good the service/product, is not sufficient for consumers to buy it. Knowing where sales and profits are coming from is key to understanding current market positions and assessing potential market directions them (McDonald et al., 2003).
Although it’s not easy, it’s quite clear nowadays that businesses must take in consideration customer’s needs and try to satisfy them – they do this by knowing the customers better. One of the methods to know the customers is Segmentation. Segmentation is the process of dividing the market into segments and developing products or services to these segments (Camilleri M.A., 2018).
Segmentation of customers enables multiple use cases in Customer Knowledge and in Marketing and Operations. Relating to Customer Knowledge we can use segmentation to:
• Gain valuable insights on market evolution and trends and customer behaviors;
• Identify least represented segments in the Databases (Gap analysis);
• Define Data acquisition and enrichment strategy;
• Identify Customer Journey pain points per segment.
On the other hand, segmentation is very useful in Marketing and Operations field to:
• Personalize RCI / OEMs communications and customer care (targets, touchpoints, channels, contents) for customers and prospects;
• Develop tailored offers (products, services, combination,…) for segments;
• Improve the performance of marketing models and calculation through the integration of segmentation outputs.
There are 3 different phases for Segmentation:
1. Definition of Segmentation;
2. Assigning a segment to each customer in our CRM;
3. Personalize marketing approach.
The first phase, definition of segmentation, is the longest one. It requires that I conduct a Market Research to get a thorough understanding of the automotive and financing market metrics to better monitor the quantitative study and its representativeness, and potentially adjust the weight of some under/over -represented categories. To ensure representativeness of RCI customers, I should conduct the same analysis. This is called the QUOTAS.
After defining Portugal Quotas (market representativeness) I will create a quantitative survey with relevant questions to target the right respondents and be able to segment them:
• Design screen-out questions to target only relevant profiles for the survey (recent car owner or intentions, new vehicle, no employees from automotive, marketing or banking industries)
• Design socio-demographic questions to be able to define typical profiles and analyze specificities between different groups of respondents
• Design segmenting questions to be able to position respondents on the X and Y axes and assign each of them into one segment.
This last point is referring to the Segmentation Matrix, where we have X and Y axes.
While the Y represents the Financial Potential (a person’s potential to subscribe to a certain level of financing/service (Total amount of financing OR Vehicle price * average % of financing)), the X represents the Financing Motivation Priority (a person’s motivation when deciding to finance its vehicle, meaning purchase based on budget, car model consideration or both (which is the main criteria to purchase a vehicle and relationship to car ownership)).
On the left side of the matrix, it’s the Budget-driven segment, known as “The Traditional”, that represents the people having a need for mobility purchasing affordable car within their budget with traditional credit and desire to own it – this group of people are driven by the budget they have (low financing potential) and want to own the car as a property.
On the right side, it’s the Car-model driven segment, which is the opposite. This segment, called
“The Progressive”, represents the people using financing to get a specific model and renew more often their car thanks to loyalty products (for example, Renting). They are also less attached to ownership of the vehicle.
In the middle, we find the Mixed segment, also called “The Pragmatist”, that includes people taking advantage of current offers and rationalizing their budget and their relationship with the vehicle.
The X and Y axes are basically comparing the potential of a person to subscribe to a financing contract with the major motivation for a person when they choose to finance their vehicle. With this distribution, we can segment our portfolio in different segments and highlight different characteristics, for example, on an email template renewal (or even in the email subject). While people in the budget-driven segment will give more attention to clear offers, low monthly payments, discounts and low interest rate (since they are motived by an offer that they perceive to be in tune with their needs and potentially advantageous), people on the car-model segment will be more proactive in seeking information about the car, maintenance and loyalty offers.
7. PAIN POINTS
When I started this project of defining the customer journey, we, as company, embraced various workshops with a Design Thinking perspective. Design Thinking is defined as a creative and analytic process that engages different persons in opportunities to experiment, create and prototype models, gather feedback, and redesign (Razzouk & Shute, 2012). It is used to solve complex problems – in this case, we had workshops with colleagues from different departments – I chose participants who have different but complementary roles and created a team called “Customer Journey Team”: 2 persons from digital, 2 from marketing, 3 from sales (one for each brand represented), 1 from tech and 2 from production/analysis. Everyone who is involved in the customer journey is important to understand the current customer experience and the main pain points faced all along the Customer Journey “as is” (current journey) and design solutions to create a smoother, easier and more personalized customer experience thanks to the “To be” Customer Journey (ideal journey), and also define ideal types based on customers’ profiles to provide personalized experience – personas. After different workshops, divided by each phase of the sales funnel, we identified the current main pain points and made a list.
Then, I created a scorecard and sent an Excel file to the local “Customer Journey Team” of the output of the “As Is” Workshops to score each pain points from 1 to 5 based on 3 criteria:
• Customer: level of impact on the Customer Journey (1: very limited impact; 5: very strong)
• Business: level of impact on RCI revenues and profitability (1: very limited; 5: very strong)
• Easiness to solve (1: very difficult; 5: very easy)
The objective was to rank the list we made and prioritize the pain points: the higher the score, the most important the pain point is.
Figure 5: Average scores
The next step was identifying the most important pain points for consumers and compare them with the results we achieved internally (Customer Journey Team). For that, we conducted the quantitative survey with relevant questions to target the right respondents and cover the entire Customer Journey.
The universe of this Survey were men and women residing in Portugal, aged over or equal to 18 years old, who have purchased a new private use vehicle in the last four years, in a sample composed by 1000 effective interviews, between 20th July to 22nd September, 2021. No employees from the automotive, marketing and banking sector were allowed in this 25 min length survey (average).
Figure 6: Quantitative Survey: Consumer Profile_Demography
Figure 7: Quantitative Survey: Consumer Profile_DemographyResidence
To the question “What were the top 5 difficulties you encountered during the buying process? (rank them in order of priority with 1 = the greatest difficulty)”, the answers average was represented in the following table:
Figure 9: Ranking of Consumers Pain Points
With both results on our hands, I conducted another ideation workshop with the Customer Journey Team to:
• Validate collectively the root causes for each pain point;
• Identify a list of possible solutions for each pain point through brainstorming;
• Score the top solution for each pain point with a vote and assess the level of effort (first level of prioritization).
This workshop provided a list of prioritized solutions that will help to build the final version of the ideal Customer Journey and a detailed action plan.
Firstly, I design the drafts of this project manually in a template and afterwards I used a helpful tool called Smaply. Smaply is a web service that hosts and presents personas and other methods, like stakeholder maps and customer journey maps. This tool, that it is used by over 100,000 organizations all over the world, was required to meet RCI’s needs, with an attractive visualization and user- friendly usage. The main objective using this tool is to create an official dashboard of the Customer Journey, personas and stakeholder maps that were previous defined in the company workshops. It’s a useful tool because it’s a centralized hub of insights about customer experience.
8. PERSONAS
A persona is an abstract description of a customer based on both qualitative and quantitative market research that I implemented, based on the actual client portfolio. The objective of having a persona (or personas) is to have a global idea of our purchasing audience and bring insights to make informed decisions on marketing, operations, sales and customer experience. It’s important that the Personas represent a significant group of customers with similar characteristics, needs, goals, and behaviors.
With the results from the Quantitative Survey (1000 answers), the HQ applied the algorithm, which returned the following categories:
Figure 10: Personas Categories
Unfortunately, I am not allowed to give any detail or information regarding the Algorithm or Formulas applied, as they are confidential. I will just share a raw Decision Tree that explains the methodology:
HQ defined 2 scores (Corp Score and Specific Score). While the Corp Score uses corporate definition (definion of renewal, churn, etc) to build the score and is based on the usage of selected countries data, Specific score can use the country specific and is based on the country data. This Decisiton Tree explains that when Recall (default performance metric used to evaluate the model) is greater than 70%, the Corp Score must be applied to that country.
For Portugal, I had to deploy 7 different types of personas and replicated for the local results:
the Persona’s Card Model sent by HQ:
• Budget-Driven High
• Budget-Driven Medium
• Car model-driven High
• Car model-driven Medium
• Cash
• Mixed High
• Mixed Medium
Figure 12: Personas Card Model sent by HQ
Figure 13: Personas Card Model replicated for Portugal (Budget Driven High)
9. PROCESS FOR SENDING A PERSONALIZED COMMUNICATION
Most marketers have difficulty in choosing the right customers to engage in successful email campaigns (Chan, 2007). To define the process of sending personalized campaigns I had to answer the questions WHO, WHAT and HOW.
First, the brand and model to be used is chosen (For the first test, I chose Renault Captur).
Then I answered each of the necessary questions:
WHO? Car Model Driven, Mixed and Budget segments (Segmentation: it allows us to propose a financial offer that is in line with our customers' expectations, to customize communications and maximize the chances of conversion).
WHAT? Differentiated Templates for each Segment (I will explain later the composition of each template).
HOW? Emailing (Microsoft Dynamics 365 app Click Dimensions - marketing automation):
allows massive sending of communication campaigns with different templates and financial offers according to the segments).
Email marketing is a powerful tool and a very popular resource in companies. An email will stay in the inbox until is read or deleted and it’s one of the cheapest ways to reach a (potential) client with products/services – DMA (Direct Marketing Association) estimates that for each 1$ spent, and email has a 38$ ROI (Return on Investment). In 2017, global email users amounted to 3.7billion users (Statista, 2018) and in 2022 this figure is set to grow to 4.3 billion users – that’s half of the world’s population.
Since I’m going to impact 3 different segments by email, the 3 segments must have different approaches.
10. EMAIL TEMPLATES
The Budget Segment should have:
• Lowest monthly payment available for that model;
• Included offers (vehicle maintenance for 3 years);
• Call to Action to discover a partnership with a Gas Station (discounts)
The Mixed Segment should have:
• Clear offer;
• Information about the car;
• Call to Action to configurate the car.
Figure 15: Mixed Segment Template
The Car Model-driven Segment should have:
• Complete visual on the car;
• Highlighting the features available (with cockpit design)
• Call to Action to discover the model in detail
11. RESULTS
The marketing analysis of the results is a process in which I compared the results of the General email and the Segmented emails. This kind of analysis answers the most basic questions about your campaigns, such as:
• How many messages were delivered? (Delivery Rate)
• How many people open the emails? (Open Rate)
• How many people clicked on the links? (Click Rate)
• How many unsubscribes do you get on average per email sent (Unsubscribe Rate)
• How many clients converted? (Conversion Rate)
Figure 17: 3 Types of Segmentation applied
The budget segment campaign was sent to 3821 listed recipients, the mixed to 1354 and the Car-model segment was sent to 228 customers. The insight that we can take from this is that Portugal is typically a country where most people that buy cars from the brand Renault, through RCI financing, are budget driven customers, meaning they choose a car based on their financing potential.
MARKETING PERFORMANCE
BUDGET MIXED
CAR
MODEL GENERAL TEMPLATE WITH ALL CAMPAIGNS Pesonalized Pesonalized Pesonalized
CAPTUR
Deliverability Rate % 91,27% 89,73% 90,79% 99,76%
Open Rate % 47,14% 44,77% 42,51% 41,31%
Click Rate % 5,11% 4,77% 4,35% 0%
Unsubsription Rate % 0,03% 0 0 0,21%
Conversion Rate* %
Figure 18: Results
Note: Conversion Rate can’t be measured yet because, with the delayed time delivery of cars
worldwide, we adjusted the report of conversion to M-6 (meaning that I only match today leads with contracts from 6 months from now)
My strategic approach will test the subject of the email, the templates display, CTA's phrases, discounts references and colors in CTA’s. In the first Segmentation Campaign, for the Renault Captur, I decided to test the Subject with reference to the price (each segment presents a different price because it is appropriate to the version of the Renault Captur that best fits the profile of the segment). As I said, I started to test the Subject including price reference (other tests will include limited time and the phrase “We have a special offer for you”).
The results from the first test showed me the following results:
• The Budget Segment
Figure 19: Results of Budget Segment
Comparing the Budget Segment with the General Campaign, I can see that the price reference in the Subject (Renault Captur por 180€/mês*) results in a higher Open Rate comparing to other segments, even against the general campaign (“Oportunidades de Renovação”). This Segment has also the higher Click Rate, even if all the templates had the same CTA (“Pedir Proposta”).
• The Car-Model Segment
Figure 20: Car-Model Segment
Analyzing the Car-model Segment with the other segment results, I can see that the price reference in the Subject (Novo Renault Captur por 250€/mês*) results in a lower Open Rate comparing to other segments. Remembering that Car-model segment people are driven through the car and not about the price.
This type of Marketing approach is based on “Test and Learn” model, meaning I have to test several times, different subjects, templates, etc to see what works best in each segment.
12. CONCLUSION
The main objective of this project was to define the customer journey and implement segmented campaigns at the end of the funnel to promote car renewals for our clients. This goal was accomplished by conducting both a quantitative and qualitative surveys and with the results, defining Personas and Segments.
After receiving the results from both surveys, I started defining local Personas and designing 3 different templates for Renault Captur. In the future, the objective is to apply the same logic to all the Group models.
Therefore, the main contribution of this project was to apply the opportunities to carry out data- driven marketing innovation process as segmentation in email marketing campaigns, personalizing RCI communications and developing tailored offers to promote renewals and loyalty.
I had to keep in mind that an effective and appealing design is important to implement throughout email campaigns. If the email is well-designed and contains relevant information, the user is more likely to take action and convert. Having a clear CTA at the top and bottom of an email will make it easier for the reader and help them click through to the landing page.
I can conclude that this first test with Segmentation worked for Renault Captur (in these specific conditions of design, prices presented, email dynamics, etc) in RCI Bank and Services, because I faced a higher Open Rate and Click Rate in all segments, but the main insight I can take is that the price reference in the email subject, works best for Budget segment.
The limitations I found was that we changed internally the interpretation of the Conversion Rate, meaning that I did not have enough time to evaluate if there was in fact a higher conversion with the segmented campaigns. Also, by the time I’m writing this thesis, only 1 more segmented campaign was sent (this time to test the limited time offer in email subject).
If anyone desires to follow-up this investigation, I recommend to Test, test and test. In an A/B test, two variations of a specific element in an email campaign are created with the purpose to see which performs best.
13. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bruce D. Temkin (2010), Mapping the Customer Journey
Camilleri M.A. (2018) Market Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning. In: Travel Marketing, Tourism Economics and the Airline Product. Tourism, Hospitality & Event Management. Springer, Cham.
Chu-Chai Henry Chan and Yu-Ren Luo, The Investigation of Online Marketing Strategy: A Case Study of eBay (2007)
Dootson, Paula, Beatson, Amanda, & Drennan, Judy (2016) Financial institutions using social media - do consumers perceive value? International Journal of Bank Marketing
Dorian Stone and John Devine (2013) From Moments to Journeys: A Paradigm Shift in Customer Experience Excellence
McKinsey (2016) Customer experience: Creating value through transforming customer journeys PwC (2017) Top financial services issues of 2018
Razzouk, Rim; Shute, Valerie What Is Design Thinking and Why Is It Important? Sep 2012
14. WEB REFFERENCES
https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=sf.mc_ss_social_studio.htm&type=5 https://everfi.com/blog/financial-education/social-media-marketing-for-banks/
https://www.digitalbankingreport.com/trends/2019-financial-marketing-trends/
https://wearesocial.com/blog/2020/01/digital-2020-3-8-billion-people-use-social-media
https://www.empiricaldata.org/dataladyblog/salesforce-social-studio-the-most-powerful-social- listening-solution
https://www.salesforceben.com/the-drip/discover-social-studio-the-5-core-features-use-cases/
https://uxpressia.com/blog/how-to-create-persona-guide-examples
https://www.statista.com/statistics/255080/number-of-e-mail-users-worldwide/