CASE STUDY
eData Maintenance and Enhancement for a Financial Services Company

AcquireWeb has worked with several Financial Services Companies (FSC’s), consisting of both regional and national brands. In particular, we are working with two national FSC’s on an on-going basis under annual eData maintenance agreements. One firm is headquartered in the Midwest and the other is headquartered in the West. The latter client is a national brand and one of the top three FSC’s in the Western United States. This study will focus on them.

The Need
We are working directly with the FSC’s Online Marketing Coordination Group. Their job is to coordinate all online marketing efforts across the FSC’s 14 different banking products and to maximize the return on marketing dollars for all banking products. In addition to maximizing value they are responsible for ensuring that no banking customer is over-communicated to by any one or multiple banking units. This client’s challenge is to grow their online database as quickly and “accurately” as possible.

The initial overall goal was to migrate as many of the FSC’s +20,000,000 banking customers into the online channel for marketing and normal banking communications as possible. The client started with 300,000 customers who had previously provided their email addresses, with a short-term goal to get 2,000,000 records appended with deliverable emails within two years. The follow-on strategy was to take the delivered records with email addresses and score them for their propensity to be receptive to other banking products. The FSC would then sequentially expose these customers to different banking opportunities depending upon their propensity score.

The Delivery
To coordinate this project, AcquireWeb worked closely with the FSC’s Marketing, IT and Scoring Groups, along with the FSC’s email launching partner to ensure a smooth process of data flow. The two largest concerns the FSC had for working with AcquireWeb were data security and data match accuracy. To address the data security issue, we instituted several security procedures, including establishing encrypted data transfer processes and dedicating and supporting a single server for this client, to ensure that no other client data was ever exposed to this FSC’s customer data. With regard to accuracy, since we were potentially talking about communicating customer financial information, it was critical that we match only the correct email address to the customer file. Hence, as a group, we decided it was better to produce cleaner results as opposed to larger volumes of data. AcquireWeb makes it a point to work with its clients to determine their precise needs, and to tailor the projects to meet those requirements. For this client we decided to proceed with a very tight individual level match.

The Results
The project began in June of 2002 and started with AcquireWeb providing data to larger and larger “test” files ranging in size from 200K to 9 MM input records. To date we have delivered over 1,000,000 viable email addresses to this FSC. Using the data we provided, the client has reported that they have achieved a positive ROI within a three-month period using their sequential product presentation strategy.

We recently signed an annual contract with this customer to deliver a program of data services, including email append and ECOA (electronic change of address). We currently receive data for maintenance and update on a monthly basis, including records for both existing and new banking customers.

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