Business Problem: Advantage Home Loans is the UK’s sub-prime mortgage lending arm of American bank Morgan Stanley. Advantage sells its products solely through the mortgage broker community. Brokers place business by telephone, or through an online mortgage application system with all transactions feeding into a back office system.

The sub-prime market is intensely competitive, with a number of vendors aggressively competing for business from the broker community. The ability to quickly identify a drop-off in a broker’s transactional activity, and react through telephone call, an email, or a visit from a member of the sales team, is key to preventing brokers from defecting to competitor vendors. And aggressive synchronized outbound email and telemarketing campaigns is an effective means of recruiting new brokers to fill the sales pipeline.

Advantage’s back office system did not provide easy access to broker data for marketing segmentation purposes, nor allow analysis of trends and insights into broker behaviour. Neither did it have the facility for importing or management of prospect lists.

Solution: Honeycomb deployed DataCentre with nightly data feeds from the back office system to build a single customer view, and transform transactional data into a format that permitted Advantage’s marketers to analyse broker activity and react accordingly. Prospect lists were then imported, flagged and de-duplicated on a regular basis to ensure that marketers could access a clean, up-to-date, combined customer and prospect marketing database.

Each broker is scored according to the recency and frequency of their transactions so that Advantage can identify those brokers who are falling off and defecting to the competition, as well as the top brokers.

Sales and marketing activity is synchronized to ensure that top brokers are rewarded appropriately and remain at the highest level of transactional activity, whilst those that are in danger of defecting, or whose activity is falling off, receive relevant, attractive offers to remotivate them to place business with Advantage, as well as telephone calls or visits from their business development managers.

Result: The sales and marketing team are running at 200% of targets. Need we say more?

Business Problem: The range of drugs manufactured by Anglo-Swedish pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca covers many therapy areas, and there are a correspondingly large number of websites designed primarily to inform and educate healthcare professionals on all aspects of these drugs by publishing the results of clinical trials, case studies, etc.

Healthcare professionals are AstraZeneca’s ‘customers’, and an understanding of the way they perceive AstraZeneca and the relationship they have with the company is key to ensuring successful sales of its drugs. From these healthcare professionals comes a core of Key Opinion Leaders that continue to promote AstraZeneca’s drugs within their professional community and underpin growth of drug sales in the future.

Solution: Honeycomb has deployed DataCentre to create for AstraZeneca’s global marketing team a single customer view across the healthcare professional community, drawing on data from all of the registered users across eight disparate therapy area websites, building a consolidated view of the interactions of heathcare professionals with AstraZeneca via its websites, and enabling the global e-marketing team to understand quickly and easily how effective its website content is in attracting the interest of heathcare professionals, and building customer segments to identify future potential Key Opinion Leaders.

DataCentre gives marketing strategists desktop access to this single customer view in a form that is easy to interrogate and segment. Nightly feeds of data into DataCentre from the various content management systems that underpin the therapy area websites ensure that the generation of customer insights is based on up-to-date website behaviour data.

Result: DataCentre has given AstraZeneca’s marketing team a completely new, and previously inaccessible consolidated view of their target audience. Now AstraZeneca’s marketing teams can build on the insights they gain from a single customer view to develop CRM programmes that deliver increased customer loyalty, leading to increased sales, and all of this with a measurable ROI.

Business Problem: Cross-channel travel is an intensely competitive market – the competition between the ferry companies, Hoverspeed itself, Eurostar, Eurotunnel, and the airlines means one thing – an ongoing battle to out-discount competitors and steal market share.

Hoverspeed had a customer database of some 700,000 names - all of whom had purchased on or offline. The problem was that the data was locked away in legacy systems and nobody could get at it without a fight. They also had retail data, customer service data, loyalty scheme data, feeds from travel agents and affiliate members.

Solution: DataCentre Honeycomb’s job was to create nightly feeds from all of these data sources so as to build one consolidated, de-duplicated, segmentable database that empowered both the marketing agency and Hoverspeed’s marketing department to attract incremental sales, rather than simply react to market fluctuations, driven by whichever competitor was most aggressive.

Using DataCentre, Hoverspeed’s marketing agency could test market & promote to their heart’s content, & beat the discounters by cleverer, more targeted, more timely direct marketing, using email to drive customers online.

Emailings of midweek offers went out - bikers to Le Mans, golfers to Le Touqet, and lovers to Antwerp. Emailings went out in French, Dutch and German, and when more email addresses were needed a direct mail piece was sent out to a huge profiled segment that looked like having the greatest disposition to switch to online.

When the French blockaded all the Calais ports other than Hoverspeed’s own, targeted lists were bought in, & injected into DataCentre to recruited new travelers to the brand. When London was awarded the 2012 Olympics an email went out to all the French customers celebrating London’s win!

Result: The ultimate objective was to switch people over to online booking - basically to transform Hoverspeed into an online business. The combination of DataCentre and astute creative marketing increased online bookings from 23% to 69% in under 10 months.

Business Problem: A high profile retail chain with over 300 outlets nationwide. In addition to its retail chain, the company has an active online retail presence, an order-taking call centre, a corporate volume sales division and a division focused on selling out-of-season or low turn products. Each of these divisions have a level of autonomy, collect data and have the capacity to cross-sell over the other divisions, not necessarily always to their commercial advantage.

Solution: DataCentre has enabled this retailer to develop a central view of all its sales and marketing data to ensure that customers are communicated with product promotions and offers that are directly related to their expressed preferences. Daily, data is drawn into this central database to review its perspective on the business at the press of a button: To use the data to determine strategies and to implement those strategies from the desktop.

Result: Lower communication costs, improved customer communications, linking all above and below the line activities, integrated within campaign management and a legally admissible audit trail to ensure compliance with the latest directives from Brussels.

Business Problem: This leading IT brand has a complex product structure requiring multi-channel distribution whilst encompassing direct relationships with some resellers into key vertical markets and direct sales to major end user accounts. The capacity for over-communication and mixed messaging is ever present. There was a need to segment and target. This hardware manufacturer was seeking to establish and manage a reseller channel in various European territories.

Solution: DataCentre was chosen to give the manufacturer desktop access to an up-to-date, consolidated view of both reseller and distributor sales activity, and to communicate directly with the reseller channel.

Result: As well as the capture mechanisms to track resellers’ and distributors' sales and provide them back to the manufacturer, Samsung has desktop access to the platform required in order to communicate with and manage the reseller channel effectively. Samsung can now quickly and easily identify which promotional activities are effective, as well as tracking resellers sales back to the individual promotions.

Business Problem: This cult food manufacturer has carved a valuable niche within an overcrowded market in high street and supermarket chains. Directly engaging with its customers through a combination of in-store promotions, web and email technology, this manufacturer has developed a programme that differentiates itself from the bland nature of its competitors and keeps its customers loyal by actively involving them in all aspects of product development through to complaints handling. 

Solution: DataCentre enables the manufacturer to centralise and manage all marketing campaign data resulting in lower communication costs, measurability and putting faces to the names of otherwise anonymous customers buying off the shelf.

Result: Database increased from 40K to 150K in three years. Penetration and sales increased by 7% and 13% repeatedly in 2005 whilst Sensations declied by 17%.