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Boursorama recruits new customers and promotes loyalty with Neolane |
Background
Established in 1995, Boursorama, a subsidiary of the Société Générale group, is one of Europe's foremost online providers of stock broking and investment services. It has nearly €7.5 billion in custody, over 486,000 customer accounts and in 2006 executed over 3.7 million orders. The group is active in four European countries: Market leader in France, n°2 in the United Kingdom (Selftrade, Squaregain), n°3 in Spain and n°4 in Germany (Fimatex, Veritas). With an income approaching €11bn Boursorama.com is France's leading portal for online financial information. It has huge audience levels with over 1 million members with active portfolios. In 2006 the site attracted 4.7 million unique visitors per month.
Context
As early as 1999, Boursorama decided to implement a direct marketing and communication strategy via Boursorama.com. The aim was to acquire new customers as well as promote customer loyalty through an email marketing campaign offering access to financial information via the portal. Prospective customers were able to use this service free of charge for a period of 10 days and could receive for example, daily market analysis and investment advice. Several thousand prospects were quick to take up this service.
The site became so popular, so quickly that Boursorama soon started to encounter operational difficulties in meeting the demand.
Challenge
Early marketing campaigns delivered ever more interest and the related workload and operational time for this activity was becoming unmanageable. On top of this, timely delivery of quality information was proving to be more and more critical in converting prospects and visitors to Boursorama.com into active customers. Additionally, it was already being recognised that other communications channels such as text messaging could be added to further boost visitors; but doing so would add even more workload to an already overloaded team.
Clearly a process had to be found to run and manage campaigns more effectively and deliver information in a more timely fashion. The company turned to Neolane.
The Neolane solution
Today, the Neolane solution, which has been interfaced with the existing PeopleSoft/Vantive CRM system, is used to automate all of Boursorama's personalised direct-marketing campaigns and to send a range of specialised newsletters by e-mail and text message.
Each personalised message directly entices the recipient to contact the call centre and make an order. Neolane's content management functionality enables the resident financial analysts to draw up content and send it without having to have any particular technical expertise.
Neolane plays an essential role in Boursorama's customer acquisition strategy. The solution is installed on 10 workstations and is used to perform 25,000 automated delivery actions each month, which represents a monthly volume of three to five million e-mails and between 50,000 and 150,000 text messages.
Benefits
Today, Boursorama's trading and investment activities benefit enormously from the portal. “The site is fantastic for attracting qualified prospects,” says Mathias Hannoteaux, Media Master at Boursorama.com. “Neolane technology is essential to our communication strategy with our rapidly-expanding community of prospects and customers. Neolane is enabling us to provide value-added services in a range of formats whilst complying with customer engagement rules.”
Boursorama has slashed by 80% the time required to create and execute communications. “Neolane plays a key role in our business development activity and helps us keep our marketing expenses under control,” explains Hannoteaux.
Boursorama uses Neolane to run a whole range of information programmes for customers and prospects including daily, weekly and monthly newsletters. “Market huddles” are sent daily via text messaging at 8:45 for France and 14:45 for the US market roundup.
Personalised text and e-mail alerts are available to customers based on the contents of their portfolios. End users can set alerts based on items in their portfolios.
Specific sales campaigns, such as invitations to wealth-management meetings and educational workshops are also executed with Neolane. “In the summer of 2006 we launched a text campaign to drum up trade during this seasonal downtime. We targeted active customers having a mobile number, who were likely to be away from the internet for the holiday period, and offered them free telephone service during this time,” explains Hannoteaux. “This offer went down extremely well and Neolane gives us the speed and agility to run such campaigns,” concludes Hannoteaux.
Future plans
Boursorama has other innovative loyalty services in the works. For example, a greater level of automation is being designed into creating messages by mapping content to pre-defined customer journeys; starting with personalised welcome packs. In addition, the alert mechanisms designed specifically for users of the Boursorama banking services are being made available to casual prospects and for 3rd generation (3G) mobile technology broadcast.
Whether it be for customer loyalty or recruitment purposes, it is clear that Neolane is playing a central role in Boursorama's marketing and communication strategies.
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