Situation:
Ever done Direct Mailing before? In any case – you should know that it is a very expensive endeavor. Imagine all the resources it demands… You need to write, put into envelopes, get stamps, figure out who to target, print the addresses, and every time you do another campaign you start all over again.
But… If the ROI is good, then who cares – well no one. At least until ROI starts decreasing and the business case begins falling apart. This was the situation Falck was in previously sending hundreds of thousands of direct mails a year.
Complication:
Quite a predicament, wouldn’t you say?
Should they abandon a previously successful method and lose the resources invested in the setup they’ve worked so hard to optimize or should they change the approach in their targeting?
Previously, Falck was aiming their efforts based on business logical rules which for them meant looking at external data such as age, car brand, geography, etc.. This had proven to be a successful approach for many years.
So what changed? Our guess is that information/comparisons got more accessible and several other channels were taking over.
Opportunity:
We’ve talked about the what, and the why (or at least a solid guess on why).
This still leaves us with the question asked in the previous section: Change approach or abandon. Abandoning would mean a significant loss in invested capital and they would have to find customers from other channels. Not an ideal option, but an option nevertheless.
However, before going down that route, they decided to flirt with the idea of being smarter with their targeting. Let’s dive into the how. What is smarter than human-biased business rules? The humble answer is quite simple, combining existing data and Allyy.io.
Resolution:
Let’s narrow it down even further. What would the ideal solution be for Falck?
Ideally, Falck wanted to be able to score their leads based on the likelihood of them converting as well as predicting what product would fit each individual lead the best, to change the downward ROI trajectory to a more favorable one (read: Rocketship).
We went ahead with lightning-speed data integration with their CRM, external lead data and previous responses to Direct Mail campaigns ascended into the Allyy.io platform. We then built prediction models and shot the data back into their CRM.
The result? Quite breathtaking – even if you are not a person that flirts with numbers that often. Allyy.io made it possible for Falck to reduce the number of letters being sent by 30% – that means saving a monstrosity of printing, envelopes, and stamps.
Now you might ask, but what about the sales performance? Obviously, it is impossible to nail it 100%, but the very few potential sales that slipped through the cracks were overall unnoticed and across the board, the initiative resulted in a headbanging 25% increase in ROI.
Not to forget, the increase in ROI is even without taking the time previously spent on rule building, into the calculation.
