Marketing Whizkid

HDFC Bank
headquartered in Mumbai is a private sector bank providing a complete range of
accounts and services including liabilities, assets, cards, direct banking, and
other products such as bill pay and advisory services. The bank has been on a
rapid growth path and it wanted this growth to be profitable. It needed an
effective way to communicate and market its growing product and service lines
while leveraging its customer base to optimize returns and bottom-line revenue,
as well as increase customer profitability through deeper, stronger customer
relationships. It needed a tool to track important events in a customer's life
so that targeted communications could be sent at the right time to build
relationships and increase profit.

Ajay Kelkar,
vice-president and head-Marketing, HDFC Bank says “To achieve this, a tool was
required to market to our existing customers and acquire new customers. Over 5
mn customer's data resides in multiple systems and communication strategies
and market analysis exist in numerous Excel spreadsheets making it nearly
impossible to design, map and manage targeted marketing efforts.”

Selling to existing
customers reduces acquisition cost and to retain old and acquire new customers,
the bank needed a central, automated process to access data across systems.
After evaluating several vendors like SAS and Teradata amongst others, HDFC Bank
selected Unica's Affinium solution for enterprise marketing management. Today,
HDFC uses Affinium to design, test, optimize, execute, and analyze all marketing
programs including event-based and multistage communication strategies. Ajay
shares that the marketing communications such as registration alerts and product
and service cross-sells, as well as models for activation propensity, response
likelihood, and usage are also completed using Affinium. HDFC Bank can now
simultaneously access its multiple data systems resulting in a complete view of
its customers across channels and products, which allows them customer modeling
in three-four weeks. Additionally, by leveraging templates and automation
capabilities, campaign volume has increased by over 200% in just six months.

As is true with any new
solution change management was a huge challenge for both the business teams and
the marketing team. Kelkar explains that they had to sort, filter and create a
base on which the application could be run and understood by the marketing
group.

Credit card activation
was one innovative area where Affinium was put to ideal use. In order to boost
credit card activation by a goal of seven to 16%, a targeted multi-channel,
multi-wave campaign has been designed. As early as ten days after a new
cardholder is approved, inactive members are identified.

These members are then
segmented into distinct groups and are sent targeted offers via their preferred
channel — email, SMS or direct mail — which vary from product to consumer
offers based on their propensity to activate and pay future fees, with the goal
of getting the card holder to activate before canceling their card or it is
“blocked” due to inactivity. For cardholders who don't respond to the
offer in the first wave, a second communication with a different offer is sent.
This campaign automatically runs every ten days. In addition to designing and
executing this activation strategy, Affinium performs real time closed-loop
analysis of the operational and financial performance of each segment and offer.

Affinium has aided the
bank to boost customer retention by 4%, and execute focused acquisition
campaigns, resulting in reduction of acquisition cost by 60% due to effective
targeting and channel optimization.

Automated analysis has
enabled performance to be monitored throughout a campaign. Next year, the bank
is looking forward to double its campaign volume by introducing both lifecycle
and event-based communications. The focus will be to drive profitable customer
base acquisition, usage and retention campaigns.

Minu Sirsalewala  

minuvs@cybermedia.co.in