Tide
Background
Tide is a business financial platform and the leading provider of digital business banking services in the UK. They had already conducted several moderately successful customer acquisition campaigns, using assumptive selections and generic solutions targeting diverse businesses in the UK.
Upon conducting post-campaign analysis, Tide’s agency partner DBS Datamarketing Ltd, presented insight showing there was a stand-out response rate from SMEs, and particularly those who had just reached their first-year anniversary.
The aim: to recruit SME’s who had completed their first year of business.
Solution
Research was conducted showing that a high proportion of businesses fail within their first year (Fundsquire, 2022). So how was this statistic related to the trend of new SME businesses signing up for Tide's services at a higher rate than established ones?
It was clear that as a result of these businesses surviving their first year, they were now ready to move from survival to thrive mode. Tide's solutions were perfect to take their business from early positive results to long-term success. As new businesses, they would have less awareness of competitor offerings and so Tide was reaching them at a pivotal moment in their journey. The compelling picture that the insights and data painted consistently centred around businesses reaching their first-year anniversary.
Mail was chosen as the media channel to target business owners. It had proven successful in past campaigns with this segment, and TIDE knew from industry research that mail led to 31% of recipients taking a commercial action, which was much higher than email (JICMAIL, 2020).
Learnings from the initial analysis was used to shape the messaging and creative. The narrative of the mail had a congratulatory tone to celebrate their success at reaching 1 year and featured inspiring narratives of real entrepreneurs of small businesses who thrived with the help of Tide's services - Welcome to the Club!
An important angle for the mailing was to remind and potentially instruct the business owners that now they have become more established businesses, they should be considering more complex business services to ground them for long term growth. And as many were new to the business financial services sector, Tide wanted to be the first voice they heard. Tide was positioned not only as a short-term solution with an exciting incentive, but a real partner to help develop these SME's into long lasting successful businesses.
Call to action considerations included that cash flow and time would be important constraints. Therefore, any incentive needed to offer financial benefits, but was also easy to activate. The targeted mail was printed with a QR code which offered £100 off upon signing up. Quick and very beneficial!
To support the campaign with solid data and insights, DBS Datamarketing Ltd provided a mailing list of 30,000 owners of businesses approaching this milestone, all who would have the highest propensity to respond.
Results
The Anniversary Campaign response rate was five times that of Tide’s expectations.
The cost per recruit was reduced by 78% vs. prior campaigns and 25% lower than the industry standard for cold financial mail (JICMAIL, 2022). This led to a 40% reduction in costs for Tide compared with past investment.
Many businesses signed up for Tide’s financial services. The impact extended beyond customer acquisition. Tide’s NPS increased by 6% vs. prior months when there was no direct mail campaign.
Quality of acquisitions was also key. Although it can take 12 months to fully assess the financial value of a customer, the new customers appear to be much more valuable than ones recruited in past campaigns.
Source: DMA Award Winner Financial Services 2023
