ERGO is one of the largest insurance groups in Europe with over 40 million customers, including 20 million in Germany alone. Like many, the company was attributing too much weight to the last marketing touchpoint and therefore could not properly steer its budget for direct marketing initiatives. Another issue was that not all direct marketing channels were tracked such as TV commercials. These, along with data silos, created several blind spots throughout the customer journey and made it hard to maximise the impact of their marketing spend. DEPT® helped ERGO resolve these by developing a Marketing Data Hub which centralised and connected all of their direct marketing data sources.
A holistic view of their data
ERGO offers a large range of personal and commercial insurance products and they have invested a fair amount in marketing activities to broadcast their brand name into the market. Yet they lacked an organised overview of their data pertaining to direct marketing activities which was coming in from many different platforms. Thus, they have been working side-by-side with DEPT® to build a state-of-the-art Marketing Data Hub to better understand and serve their current customers as well as to acquire additional ones in a much more cost-efficient way.
We created a marketing data hub to give ERGO a holistic view of their data
Step-by-step process
DEPT® tackled the problem head-on. We began by doing a deep analysis of the client’s internal business requirements in order to better understand the company’s status quo in terms of data, technology and organisational readiness as well as to properly understand their data vision. Based on this information, our team developed a technical blueprint for a cloud-based marketing tech stack tailored to ERGO’s specific needs. This became the foundation for building the actual technical infrastructure which centred around a Marketing Data Hub as a source for all direct marketing activities. By having everything under one roof, the company was able to view and analyse the entire customer journey rather than piece it together from various silos. Thus allowing them to play around more with different marketing strategies and campaigns depending on who they want to target when. This also fostered a ‘self-serve culture’ which allowed employees to see and query the data themselves in order to implement a more data-driven approach to their daily work.
Once the infrastructure was in place, we built an Attribution Model making it possible for the company to see what percentage of each marketing channel was involved in the conversion process. Online data sources were added first, then offline ones and lastly the two were combined to get a holistic understanding of the entire customer journey. Once the prototype was fully functional, additional data sources, such as TV commercial data, were added which enriched the user-centricity of the database.
Lastly, we ensured that all relevant ERGO teams were comfortable using the new self-serve analytics infrastructure and fully understood the business logic behind it. We did this via on-site and remote trainings.
Results
Our team was able to deliver a custom Marketing Data Hub which helps ERGO achieve a better understanding of who their customers are, how they are finding and connecting with the brand, and how each marketing activity is contributing towards the conversion process. DEPT® was also able to close several critical tracking gaps and made uplifts from TV commercials transparent for the first time.
The project is still young but now that the company has all their marketing data in one place, the Marketing Data Hub has given the employees a trustworthy place where they can analyse all of the various customer journeys. Best of all, as more data points continue to pour in, this will continuously improve due to the increase in statistical significance over time. The collaboration is still ongoing and DEPT® is supporting ERGO as they roll this out to other departments and teams.
