Fortune 50 Retail Bank
Analysis:
The subject bank executes brand and affinity marketing for all of their credit card products via external agencies. The volume of these mailings ranges from 10 to 20 million mail packages, all requiring processing for production in 24- 48 hour periods. These highly complex drops have the following attributes:
- Strict regulatory requirements requiring exact formatting control
- Several hundred versions using 10+ different mailing packages
- More than 400 rules processed with four levels of depth to prepare data for execution
Issues included lack of visibility into status of a project, inconsistent audit ability, and manual change management.
Overall, the bank is unable to make improvements to cycle time, improve the relevancy of the marketing communications, or have confidence in delivering on-time, high-quality, and on-budget projects. Much of the inability to meet these goals is believed to be due to a disaggregated workflow trying to manage numerous vendors along with internal processes. Often times midstream workflow task modifications left uncertainty to the impact of the project
Strategy:
They implemented the Intelisent Platform to manage both the data and creative workflows, enabling audit ability and transparency throughout the process. The highly complex business rules were built using the web-based business rule editor in the platform. Creative asset management was centralized in the Intelisent Platform, taking advantage of built-in version control and the variable content library. In addition, they were able to begin taking some of the changes in-house, improving cycle times, ensuring quality, and reducing costs.
Results:
Workflow templates and repeatable processes have increased efficiency. Repetitive, error-prone manual work has been greatly reduced. Cycle time is now measured in hours. Change management is controlled via workflow in the platform, and version control is retained.
Key metrics included:
Measurable steps and accountability in the workflow
Error-free transition from existing production workflows
Cycle time for change management is in hours instead of days
Easy to replicate change management processes
Reduced production costs
Fortune 50 Telecommunication Company
Analysis:
This telecommunications company handles 1 Billion+ direct mail messages and 1,000+ campaigns annually. The supply chain is splintered across 10 agencies and multiple production suppliers. Standard processes are lacking across business lines, causing high risk with the handling of data and creative. Unpredictable processes are also resulting in "cost creep" and impacts to quality.
Strategy:
The goal of the telecommunications company is to streamline its marketing operations ecosystem. By forming a central point of management around the Naehas-Intelisent Platform, the company can reduce administrative overhead and process inefficiencies and standardize on best practices across all agency partners. Utilizing the Naehas-Intelisent Platform automation enables the telecommunications company to deliver a consistent and repeatable process by type of program, ensuring efficiency and eliminating manual execution errors. Centralized storage from an end-to-end platform allows the company to reuse workflows, organize templates and assets, and easily set up and execute projects to deliver high quality communications.
With a cohesive ecosystem in place, an intelligent and distributed production network can minimize risk, reduce cycle time, and ensure high quality communications are delivered.
Streamlining the entire marketing operations ecosystem sees cost savings in several areas: implicit cost savings from reduced cycle times in the overall process, and explicit cost savings in print production due to a more transparent supplier selection process and more consistent delivery formats across all projects.
Results:
Implementing the Intelisent Platform resulted in the following improvements:
- Error-free transition from existing production workflows
- Ability to execute daily drop campaigns with minimal resources
- Cycle times reduced by 30% to 80%
- Reduced proofing times by up to 67%
- Delivered more than $10 million in print production savings
- Executed with 99.9% print accuracy
Case Study: Synchronizing Direct Mail with Email Leads to 33% Lift
A regional retail store decided that it wanted to trigger emails upon the delivery of a direct mail solicitiation. Working with Intelisent, a campaign was established in which the direct mail pieces were tracked using OneCode Confirm. Then using Intelisent's CampaignSync, upon notification of the delivery of each customer's direct mail, an email was pushed the following day. The email specifically reinforced the sales message of the direct mail solicitation. By timing the delivery of the email for the next day, this customer saw its conversion rates increase by nearly one-third, from 1.54% (mail only) to 1.98% (mail plus triggered email)
Case Study: $500,000 per year Savings from Suppressing Undeliverable Mail
A major mailer has a regular twice-monthly mailing of between 6 million and 9 million pieces, which it sends as First Class. Prior to working with Intelisent, the undeliverable mail was being returned to the mail owner where it was securely destroyed, but the company was not capturing any information from the returned mail because they felt it was cost prohibitive. This lack of return mail information left the company with no visibility into potential savings opportunities or address accuracy.
- In this case, the mailer was able to suppress more than 150,000 records from their first month's mailing for all subsequent mailings. Without the data showing why these pieces were undeliverable, the company would have kept mailing. These pieces would have been mailed 11 more times over the next 12 months at 36¢ for postage and 8¢ for production. The company saved approximately $500,000 over the next 12 months by suppressing this single population of UAA mail.
- Further, the company had a sense of its true response rate. For example, when it mailed 100 pieces and got one response, it assumes a 1% response rate. But if in reality 9 pieces were not delivered, the response rate was actually 1.10%. This information provides marketing with a more accurate view of the success of the campaign.
Intelisent's WebTrack service transformed this mailer's direct mail strategy by using the Intelligent Mail Barcode. Many companies have shied away from ACS because it requires two additional lines of characters, numbers, and symbols above the name and address block, the key code and the subscriber ID. This clunky and impersonal information made ACS a non-starter for many companies. With the Intelligent Mail Barcode, OneCode ACS information is embedded in the barcode. Mailers can turn it on and turn it off with no impact to the look and feel of the mailpiece. It is truly an “on demand†function that a mailer can use to measure service performance and undeliverables. The opportunities with OneCode ACS and OneCode Confirm are enormous. Intelisent can make it happen.
Case Study: Confirm Tracking Prevents a Sales Disaster
Background: Client is one of the largest US Financial Services firms. For a large (5.5 Million piece) mailing with an expiration date, early indicators pointed out that this mailing might be in jeopardy of not hitting its planned in-home target range. That's when the Intelisent team jumped into action.
Analysis and Action: The Mail Owner was able to use Intelisent WebTrack OneCode Confirm to review piece level visibility based on real-time scan data throughout the USPS automation processing systems, all the way to projecting delivery dates. The Intelisent WebTrack OneCode Confirm system also produced diagnostic information on several issues that were impeding the progress of the mailing. The resulting report data was used in several different ways:
- Verify lettershop activity
- Verify transportation plans and activity
- Convince USPS Operations team to expedite mail still in the system
- Monitor daily delivery
- Identify customers affected by late delivery
Response: With the assistance of the Intelisent mail agents, the client was able to determine with specificity which mail was "stuck" in the system. A remediation plan was established in which the USPS was notified and requested to accelerate delivery of as much of the mailing as possible. A list of all customers identified for late delivery was pulled and provided to the ecommerce team for targeted emails and call centers were notified to provide outbound phone solicitations to customers.