Customer Empowered Marketing: The Strategy Behind Sydbank ‘Favorit’

Challenge

One of the great challenges in customer retention is to make your customers valued for their loyalty, without breaking the delicate equilibrium a new reward system may threaten.

To optimise its customer retention programme, Sydbank worked with Customer Empowered Marketing on its new customer loyalty programme ’Sydbank Favorit’, which rewarded customers depending on their level of financial engagement with the bank.

In order to make sure that the system would be well received and easy to use, Sydbank understood that gaining precious customer insights before launch would have been fundamental for the success of the programme. 

Solution

We helped Sydbank define the objective of its study – to discover if its customers understood the loyalty programme, were interested in using it, and appreciated how important it was for Sydbank to include them throughout the development phase.

Results

Sydbank tested its initiative several times, using the “Loyalty concept validation” study from our Marketplace. Every time, the bank got clear insights from its customers on video within a few days, which it then used to make minor adjustments to its ‘Favorit’ initiative before launch.

Impact

Thanks to real customer insights, Sydbank has had great success in launching its new customer loyalty programme. Almost half of the bank’s customers went through ’Sydbank Favorit’ – and almost 90% of those agreed to be contacted by the bank. Eventually, the programme would be nominated for the Danish Digital Award.

Insights That Matter: How Alm. Brand Boosted Newsletter Signups by 20%

Challenge

When it comes to communicating with your customers, choosing what to say, how to say it, and when to say it is essential. This is especially true for insurance companies: after all, when your job is to ensure your customers’ most valuable possessions, you want to be sure they will read and understand your updates without the risk of finding them irrelevant.

‍But how can you make sure your content is read and understood by all?
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‍For Alm. Brand, the answer laid in its newsletter. More in detail, the company wanted to understand what content was readworthy for its customers and use this knowledge to craft a compelling email series.

Solution

Sonar tested Alm. Brand’s newsletter using the ‘Newsletter’ study from its insights marketplace. For this study, Sonar interviewed 10 people from the company’s target group- half existing customers, and half not. This design gave insight into both biased and unbiased interactions and behaviour towards the newsletter, showing what content customers found really valuable.

Each interview was filmed and broken down into qualitative data, then analysed by a team of specialists and aggregated into a set of actionable, customer-backed insights.

Results

Alm. Brand received all full videos, an executive summary, and a report with 3 key takeaways, suggestions for next steps, and 9 concrete optimization points addressing potential initiatives to better reach its target audience.

Impact

With actionable insights from its customers, the insurance company had all the tools to reforge its newsletter and make it more attractive to its target group. The results were immediate: upon implementing some of these insights, Alm Brand increased its newsletter signups through referrals by 20%.

Revving Up Adoption: How Toyota Optimised Its Insurance Service

Challenge

Toyota was offering a new free insurance service named ‘Toyota Relax’ to all Toyota owners that serviced their vehicles yearly in any of its dealerships. The initiative aimed at retaining clients, increasing customer loyalty, and boosting customer lifetime value. However, despite the convenience of this new service, Toyota was not seeing the adoption rate it had hoped.

Solution

Toyota partnered with Sonar to conduct a concept validation test with its Danish customers. Sonar designed the study, recruited and interviewed the participants, and aggregated their feedback into a set of actionable insights on video. To minimize research bias, half the study participants already owned the service “Toyota Relax”, while the other half did not.

Results

The results of the test showed two key insights: existing service subscribers had no knowledge of how to use the ‘Relax’ insurance, whereas other Toyota owners were not familiar with the service at all. These findings gave Toyota a clear indication of the barriers preventing adoption, as well as how to optimize communication to both Relax subscribers and non-subscribers.

Impact

With clear customer insights, Toyota optimised its communication strategy across touchpoints. This led to a higher service adoption, increased customer loyalty and customer lifetime value.