engage Mutual Assurance uses smartFOCUS's smartANALYZER and smartMODELER solutions to better analyze and segment a pool of 19.4 million prospects. This has increased mailing list preparation speed from 5 days to 1 day and increased response rates by 20%. smartANALYZER provides a single view of customer data, enabling more targeted communications. smartMODELER builds predictive models 10 times faster than previously to improve acquisition and retention. The solutions have saved over a day per week of analytical time and significantly improved business performance through partners like Asda.

1. ENGAGE MUTUAL ASSURANCE USES
SMARTFOCUS TO INCREASE RESPONSE
RATES BY 20%
engage Mutual Assurance is one of the top 50 largest direct
marketers in Britain. The company provides protection and savings products
both directly and through partners including Asda,
Yorkshire Building Society and Park Row Associates Limited.
Customer
Synopsis engage Mutual Assurance
Cequity's end-to-end suite of integrated
services includes customer management
When engage Mutual acquired a prospect pool of 19.4 million people, it needed a way to consulting, marketing database &
Industry sector
analyze and manage the data in order to maximize its potential. smartFOCUS’s information management solutions,
Financial Services
smartANALYZER provides this, and has cut the time taken to prepare mailing lists from five analytics, metrics & dashboards and
days to just one day, and with a better understanding of customers and prospects, response campaign measurement support. Our
rates have been increased by 20%.Challenges and Solutions state-of-the-art technology solution,
Solution
Cequity ACE is powered by smartFOCUS
Intelligent Marketing
and is a hosted customer marketing
The challenge system that can be quickly implemented
Solution components
without major hardware or software
investments. This helps us deliver rich yet
engage is one of the UK market leaders in ‘Whole of Life’ insurance policies and sells these
valuable, information-driven, customer
directly and through its affiliate partners. The policy is available to people aged between 50
experience Quality/Management
Data opportunities for you.
and 80 without a medical and pays out on death. The company sends mailings to prospects
just before their next birthday, explaining the greater value a savings plan bought today
Single Customer View
“From our experience, the Intelligent Analytical
will return in comparison to one purchased after their birthday.
Marketing from smartFOCUS makes it possible
Analysis & Visualization
to instantly analyze, segment, identify and
When engage Mutual acquired a prospect pool of 19.4 million people, it needed a way to analyze
communicate with large volumes of customers
the data and extract targeted mailing lists. It also needed a solution that was capable of Predictive Modeling
and contacts on an individual basis. Intelligent
managing all of its data in one place, including the prospect pool, the existing customer database,
Marketing improves customer communications -
and other data sources such as MOSAIC for demographic profiling. Campaign Management
throughout the entire lifetime of a company-
customer relationship and makes performance
Email Marketing
driven multi-channel marketing a reality.
The solution
smartFOCUS is faster and more efficient than we
Online Execution
thought it would be!”
engage Mutual uses smartANALYZER to analyze all its data and extract mailing files from the
Marketing Performance Management
prospect pool. “Because it’s intuitive and we can make changes on the fly, it enables true train of
thought analysis,” said Rob Frost, Customer Insight Manager at engage Mutual Assurance. “Our
Managed Service
CEO - Cequity Solutions
prospect pool is based only on people aged 50-80, we can then compare against
suppression and exclusion lists, narrow the selection to mainland UK, exclude those who have
Consultancy Services
a policy already, and focus on those who responded to our last communication. If we go too
far, we can take a step back again. We can also make sure that we are following, monitoring
Reporting
and constantly revising our contact strategy. It used to take us 10 days to get a mailing to the
printers. Using smartANALYZER, we’ve cut five days of preparatory work down to just one day.”
smartFOCUS provided consultancy services to support engage Mutual in building and deploying its
initial prospect targeting models. Using smartMODELER, engage Mutual identifies prospects that
most closely match the profiles of existing customers. “Using SAS, it would take us one and a half
to two weeks to build a model. Now smartMODELER does the hard work for us and builds a
model in a tenth of the time. We can then spend more time with the results and test different
permutations. This helps us gain a real detailed insight and this is going a long way in helping us
improve our acquisition and retention rates.”
smartANALYZER is also providing greater insight into the data than engage Mutual has had
before. “Seven million names in the prospect pool have a date of birth,” said Frost. “We can now
use smartANALYZER as a planning tool, so that we know we will have 650,000 birthdays in May,
for example. We can also quickly investigate variables and judge their data quality. So, for example,
the internal marital status field is mostly empty, and the data that is populated is against people
we no longer contact. We now know not only not to use this field in selections but we have also
informed IT so that they can remove the field from our overnight extracts saving a few precious
minutes in refresh time.”
continued overleaf

2. Others in the marketing department have access to the latest data through smartREPORTER
(smartANALYZER’s integration with Excel). “Users can process the data using Excel without
needing to ask for help from analysts,” said Frost. “This allows non-technical people to run
basic profiles and analysis when they want it. This frees up analytical time and is a real win-win
situation.” The smartANALYZER Database is updated every night and report generation can
also be automated. For the above campaign this gave marketing managers and executives the
opportunity to have a bespoke refreshed report on their desktop first thing in the morning.”
smartANALYZER and smartMODELER were implemented in 20 days. “The software is easy to install
and administer,” says Frost. “There’s no need for a database administrator and little need for us to
bother IT.”
The bottom line
“smartANALYZER has enabled us to be faster and more reactive,” said Frost. “We’re saving
about one day a week over all that we would have spent working on data, and which we can
now spend on analysis and strategic initiatives. Until we started using smartANALYZER, we
couldn’t calculate easily or quickly the average length of a relationship, how many times we
were mailing each person, or whether we could make savings from only mailing each household
“The software is easy to
once. By understanding our customers better and improving our targeting, we’ve been able to
install and administer,” says Frost.
increase our response rates by 20% in our own-brand direct mailings. When we work with
partners like Asda, we can tell them with confidence what kind of response they should expect, so
“There’s no need for a database
that they can decide whether to proceed. With our Asda branded mailings we’ve been able to
bring in a significant amount of new business. It’s been so successful that they have turned what
administrator
was going to be a one-off into a regular mailing and it now forms a key part of our
sales plans going forward.”
andtle need for us to bother
IT.”
About engage Mutual Assurance
engage Mutual Assurance is the sixth largest Friendly Society in the UK. It is a young, modern
and progressive 25-year-old organization, based in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. The business
Reach us at:
employs 180 people, has 340,000 customers and has £647.4 million of total assets. engage
Mutual’s mission is to enable people to protect their welfare by providing customers with 105-106, 1st Floor, Anand Estate,
simple, accessible, value for money protection and savings products. 189-A, Sane Guruji Marg, Mahalaxmi,
Mumbai-400 011, India
Phone: +91 22-43453800
About smartFOCUS
Fax: +91 22-43453840
smartFOCUS provides software and services that enables companies to manage and coordinate
For more case studies, white
marketing across multiple channels, including email, telemarketing, direct mail and display
papers and presentations log on to:
advertising. The company provides a complete portfolio of data integration, analysis, modeling,
campaign planning and management, with integrated budgeting and finance solutions. www.cequitysolutions.com
The result is ‘Intelligent Marketing’, driven by a single view of the customer’s activities across
all channels. Marketers can target their communications more accurately, cutting wastage,
Or Write to:
increasing conversion rates and achieving a better understanding of the customer base.
info@cequitysolutions.com
Users of smartFOCUS’s enterprise marketing management software include AAA, ABN AMRO,
Carrefour, EMI, Fig Leaves, Harrods, Hilton International and News International, NSPCC, For the latest thinking in Analyical
and T-Mobile. Marketing, check out our blog at:
blog.cequitysolutions.com
smartFOCUS is headquartered in Bristol, UK, with offices in the US and continental Europe.
Contact Details
International Offices
Headquarters Paris Office
One Redcliff Street Tour Ventôse
BRISTOL Note: This is an2‘original paper’ by smartFOCUS. Cequity ACE is powered by
rue des Bourets
smartFOCUS and Cequity uses this distinguished technology to empower its end-to-end suite
of analytical marketing and customer relationship management solutions.
Powered by