Customer 360 Degree View Helps Increase Customer Engagement
The journey of strengthening the marketing campaigns, subscription rate and converting leads into opportunities for a giant shipping corporation to create effective marketing and sales funnel and stronger customer relationships.
You know this will be an interesting assignment, when a Logistics leader like Maersk, calls you to solve a problem for them! Entangled in the hawsers of their marketing strategies, they needed a pilot to guide them out to clear waters and onwards to their destination! Read on …
Context and Company Profile
A global integrator of container logistics, Maersk needs no introduction! Founded in 1904 in Svendborg, Denmark, they are the harbingers of connecting and simplifying the customers’ supply chains and have grown to be the largest container ship and supply vessel operator in the world. They serve 374 offices in 116 countries and have clocked an annual revenue of US$38.9 billion in 2019.
As a trusted partner to their customers for decades, Maersk continually strives to retain the trust of its customers. In their endeavour to offer better and simplified trade options, Maersk constantly embraces new perspectives and opportunities. Always open to better understanding of who they serve, they welcomed OceanFrogs with open arms to get their digital marketing strategies in place.
What Maersk needed was a lighthouse that would safely guide their digital marketing ship to safer shores – and OceanFrogs became their guiding light!
Challenges
Maersk builds on an extraordinary heritage of pioneering success and growth and has been enjoying a coveted position in the shipping trade space for a long time now. However, every organization needs to keep up with changing Global regulatory frameworks (GDPR), marketing trends and technology to be able to serve their value statement. This paradigm shift caused a grave impact on the subscription rates and digital marketing models of Maersk. While this created an opportunity for Maersk to revamp their digital marketing approach, they were facing the following challenges –
1. Need to bring more subscribers
2. Need to increase Coverage of Decision
Makers
3. Low Engagement among Subscribers
Need to bring more subscribers
GDPR is affecting every enterprise business. We all have to figure out new ways to do marketing and without violating the privacy laws. These times are challenging for marketers. Maersk was witnessing a spike in un-subscriptions on their promotional campaigns. Reasons for this unsubscription were not clear.
Need to increase Coverage of Decision Makers
Relationship with decision makers and influencers amongst customers is very important for Maersk. It is one of the top priorities of Maersk to increase coverage within customers, and build relationships.
Low Engagement among Subscribers
Maersk has a large subscriber base. Engaging such a large subscriber base is never easy. Maersk has done quite a good job of engaging its audience over the years. In fact, engagement metrics such as email open and click rate have performed better than industry averages. Marketing at Maersk understands the shifts taking place in Industry. The team wants to proactively work on engaging the subscribers, make sure that marketing dollars provide return on investment, build a sales funnel with a good conversion ratio
Solution
Maersk and OceanFrogs conducted brainstorming sessions and concluded that we need to understand our customers more. It is possible to do so when we analyze behavior and response to marketing campaigns. We divided our objectives in three step approach:
3 Step Approach:
1. Capability to build classification models on customer behavior
2. Capability to enrich their company and contact data
3. Identify total addressable market
OceanFrogs experts took help from Time-Series Analyses, Machine Learning, and Data Enrichment Techniques to dive into large datasets that Maersk have. Data Enrichment helped bring more dimensions on company data. Classification modeling techniques generated insights on customer journeys by geography, product, marketing campaigns used, and time of the year.
OceanFrogs brought data from a large number of silos and disparate data sources, de-duplicated contact and company data information, and built the knowledge graph so that insights could be generated. It evolved into a customer data platform (CDP) that can be asked questions on subscription rate, customer coverage, marketing campaign effectiveness, customer engagement with Maersk and customer’s journeys.
OceanFrogs not only studied un-subscription trends, the return on investments, subscriber and un-subscriber coverage, but also examined the top accounts of Maersk, the pages visited on Maersk’s site, the transaction data and provided insights and recommendations that Maersk could follow.
New decision-makers for their target accounts and existing customers. OceanFrogs applied mature modeling techniques such as Recency Frequency Monetary model to classify Maersk’s customers in various categories such as champions, loyal, about to lose, lost customers. This allowed us
Covid scenario – There is no use of a study in the current scenario if it does not consider the impact of Covid. Marketing team at Maersk wanted to understand customer behavior before and during Covid. Recency, Frequency, and volume of shipments were compared for two time periods. This helped identify customers who might have been impacted due to Covid.
Benefits
The biggest and clear benefit of this engagement between Maersk and OceanFrogs is that the customer data lake is ready. We can dive in it now to find insights, build patterns, relationships, and conduct root cause analysis.
1. Customer data lake is ready, Maersk can conduct reports and analysis that it longs for.
2. Account Coverage has increased dramatically.
3. It was proven that marketing campaigns succeed when content is right, has been experimented with.
OceanFrogs increased the account coverage for geographies where account coverage is limited. It was clear based on analysis that marketing campaigns were more successful when the audience was carefully classified and the campaign message was clear. There was no doubt in our analysis that performance of campaigns was high when experiments on content were conducted for a long period of time.
It was found that the audience personas are right. Analysis of customers and their engagement allowed us to know the significant share of customers that can be brought back as loyal customers. OceanFrogs identified that there is a good number of customers that got affected during Covid and should be approached in a personalized way.
Maersk and OceanFrogs wish to continue this engagement for multiple regions and audience personas. It is truly a goal for both the parties to develop models that can help understand customers better.
