accelerate agency shortlisted for ‘Best Use of Data’ at the UK Growth Awards 2020
We are absolutely thrilled to be shortlisted for ‘Best Use of Data’ at the UK Digital Growth Awards for our work with Principality.
The work recognised entailed transforming the building society’s financial website into one that functioned and reported like an e-commerce website. Traditionally, an e-com or financial site will use multiple platforms to document and detail financial reporting, inventory management and media spend – however we consolidated this under one roof through the ‘Best’ use of data.
The UK Digital Growth Awards is about celebrating exceptional agencies, the great work and talent that have driven digital growth and sales across all sectors and can demonstrate real and tangible results to the bottom line.
Read the full case study below…
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About the challenge
Principality is a Building Society, based in Cardiff, Wales. Whilst they are the largest in the country, and favoured amongst older generations, this pool is unfortunately shrinking due to its aging population. In addition to this, Principality has been operating predominantly offline – so with a new younger audience to target, they decided a digital transformation was critical in order to remain at the top.
Target audience & strategy
Principality’s primary customer base was predominantly baby boomers residing in rural locations of Wales. Whilst their current base was loyal, the pool was slowly shrinking due to an aging population. The building society wanted to expand their marketing share by attracting:
- Millennials (young families and first home buyers)
- Metropolitan residents
In order for Principality to become truly modernised for its modern users, Accelerate set out to mirror Principality’s website to that of an e-com website. Let us explain…
If we take Amazon (for example), a user will go through the process of adding a product to their basket, and then moving through to purchase. While Principality’s products aren’t tangible like Amazon’s it didn’t mean the user-journey needed to be different. This is where Accelerate created the Fin-Com solution.
We broke it down into two parts:
Planning phase one: We designed a system that imported the following metrics:
- Lead-to-sale rate
- Margin per product
- Mortgage & Savings rates
- Mortgage deposits amounts
- Product life span The calculation of these metrics would determine the profit-per-product, which would factor into phase two.
Planning phase two: We looked at how we could improve Principality’s product/marketing strategy and allocate their media spend more efficiently by analysing what products were performing.
The aim was to move from a CPA bidding to a ROAS bidding strategy, this would enable the building society to get more “bang for their buck” from aggregator websites, paid search and paid social activities.
Implementation & creativity
We set-up an automated daily crawl of Principality’s website to extract the product IDs, savings and mortgage rates, per page. The data collected was entered into our bespoke database in order to allow a server-side look-up, which returned the profit-per-product.
In parallel, we set GTM to read the product data from the website and look-up the profit-per- product; saving this information as a cookie. This then allowed us to send the transactional and profit data on the final step which was the application complete page.
This is the moment where the financial site started reporting as an e-com website – thus was born Fin-Com. We mapped pages on the website to the relevant e-com stages, predetermining how visitors would traverse from product pages, products in cart, through to the purchase page.
For any customer who didn’t make it to the form sent page, we enabled dynamic remarketing to pass the product ID, page type, and conversion intent step to Adwords. This created the ultimate retargeting opportunity for Principality.
Results & evaluation
The building society now makes better informed data-driven decisions on their savings and mortgage rates, not to mention their customers have a more efficient and effective buyer journey.
We’ve enabled Principality to be more responsive, allowing them to adjust their media spend to changing markets and customer buying behaviours, which has resulted in higher profit margins and more customers.
Over the course of a year, we:
- Increased Principality’s transaction conversion rate by 650%
- Increased savings applications by 704%
- Improved funnel non-abandons by 309%