Michel Seifert, head of direct marketing at Ceská
sporitelna, the Czech Republic’s largest retail bank, tells Douglas
Blakey of a major increase in his budget and discusses plans to
treble his marketing team. Seifert expects to demonstrate a return
on the marketing investment inside one year.
7 June can be
marked off in the diary of Michel Seifert as having been a
resounding success. On that date, he presented detailed plans to
the directors of Erste Group, including a request for a substantial
increase in budget and a trebling of his marketing team.
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“I got the investment from the board I
requested – and one year from now I will return to the board and
show that the results are as I forecast,” Seifert says.
“This investment will pay off. I told
the directors that I currently lead a team of 13 people,
responsible for 1,200 campaigns a year. I showed them calculations
that demonstrated the returns I could get with a team of 42 people
running 10,000 campaigns a year.
“We have a huge potential customer
base, but must be more relevant to more of our customers. So now,
we will run an increased number of smaller marketing campaigns.
“We have to be relevant to some of our
customers currently untouched by our marketing treatments; the aim
is to come up with a campaign strategy for every customer.”
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By GlobalDataAside from his budget success,
Seifert has one other big advantage within Erste: the freedom to
blaze a marketing trail in the Czech Republic.
“I am lucky to be at the cutting
edge of the Erste Group and have the liberty to show the group what
should be the next level of marketing activity,” he says.
Seifert’s good humour and bullish
outlook only slips at the suggestion that all of the planned
marketing activity will be a factor in boosting Ceská’s cross-sell
metrics.
“While we have very specific
commitments for sales targets – and do not forget that direct
marketing is very fact-based – I do not know the cross sell metric
for Ceská,” he said.
“Cross-sell is not that important
for me, in fact, I do not have a cross-sell metric goal as part of
my own key performance indicators.”
Nor is product pricing a key
element for Seifert. Instead, he is focused on the return on
investment from the lifetime of the customer.
“Our campaigns or customer
treatments as I term them, may even be designed not to sell
products. What we will do is ensure that we reinforce the
customers’ relationship with the bank and to do that we will use
all of the marketing channels you can imagine.”
In particular, Seifert said the new
marketing activity will be experienced by customers who are not
currently using Ceská as their main banking partner.
“If you are a Ceská customer but
only banking with us as an inactive customer, we may not be
reaching you with our current marketing,” he adds. “That will
change and you will now experience some activity from us.”
Ceská has implemented SAS’s
Marketing Optimisation product to optimise existing marketing
campaigns and increase income while maintaining current numbers of
both solicited clients and executed campaigns.
“We are now able to carefully
calculate and pick the right treatment for each customer,” Seifert
says. “We are finally making a true turnaround from the disparate
efforts to manage target groups [selecting clients good for a
particular product offer] to instead selecting treatments for a
given individual client.”
To prepare for the increased
marketing activity, Ceská worked with SAS partner Capgemini to
build and develop a data warehouse optimised for CRM.
Seifert says that choosing SAS “was
a rational, not emotional” process.
“We defined the bank’s needs and
sent out a request for information to three or four vendors, only
two of whom came back with a relevant proposal,” he adds.
According to Seifert, Ceská’s
marketing campaign managers are now responsible for the entire
campaign process, starting with the selection of the target group
through to the fully automated campaign evaluation. The campaign
manager is autonomous, freeing the data mining team to dedicate its
time to developing sophisticated statistical models and improving
predictive capabilities.
Ceská can test each campaign before
sending it into full production, selecting a target group ranging
from 1,000 to 5,000 customers each.
The campaign manager sets a goal
(return on investment or profit), monitors the test group results
for potential issues, modifies and refines after testing and then
pushes to the rest of the customers.
Testing the campaigns allows Ceská
to improve the campaign before real operations. It may also give a
campaign manager the opportunity to stop an unsatisfactory
campaign. By using SAS to automate recurring campaigns and
eliminate unprofitable ones, Ceská has realised a time savings of
approximately 20%.
“The fully automated evaluation of
all our campaigns, which we now have, has a great importance for
our ability to clearly see what we do and to ‘sanitise’ the
portfolio of our campaigns on a regular basis,” said Seifert.
While the investment in IT will
assist achieve his targets, Seifert acknowledged technology alone
was not enough.
“I have set some big marketing
challenges and that takes not just technology, it needs more
people,” Seifert said.
“I will have one-half of the new
team members in place by the end of the year and will go back to
the board to show that my numbers are adding up by the end of the
first quarter next year.”
Seifert spoke to RBI during the SAS-sponsored Premier
Business Leadership conference in Antwerp (see
Complacency,
crisis, caution, confidence?).
