This page has the full written transcript of Eileen Pevreall's session. You can download the audio recording and the presentation from Eileen's presentation summary page.
Both the podcast recording and transcript have been slightly edited for clarity.
RICHARD SEDLEY:
I'm Richard Sedley, director of the cScape Customer Engagement Unit. This edition of the cScape podcast is focused on a customer engagement case study presented by Eileen Pevreall, IT director for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Eileen has been the prime move in the institute's increased focus on online customer engagement and here she tells us how the CIPD transformed one of the most important times in the institute's calendar: their membership renewals period.
To download the accompanying visuals and a written summary, visit the cScape website at www.cscape.com – and don't forget to check out the CIPD website at www.cipd.co.uk.
EILEEN PEVREALL:
I'm going to talk to you briefly about what I think is some exciting work that we've been doing that has been moving us, I feel, from what we saw as a user-experience provision into a model of customer engagement.
I'll start of telling you a little bit about CIPD. We're a membership organisation and the professional body for those involved in people management and development. We've got about 320 staff and in terms of the internet element, we've got about 20 external development people as resource and at any one time we're using about 10-plus internet consultant.
In 2004, we re-launched our website and it's interesting to consider the contrast between the traditional model of re-launching vs. iterative development. I think we've certainly moved away from that concept of going into a big re-launch cycle, but we did do that in 2004 and at the time, we won a couple of awards, including for 'best membership website', which we are very proud of. The site has about 60,000 pages of content. It's very information-rich. We've got about 270,000 registered users, about 200,000 unique visitors a month, about 2.5 million visits a year and last year we processed, through our e-commerce system, 4.5 million. For those who run commercial sites, these figures don't sound very high, but we're very proud of establishing that, in terms of a membership site.
For the last 18 months, I've been co-ordinating a cross-departmental digital marketing and customer engagement initiative. We keep talking about touch strategies and customer engagement – and with all this touching and engaging, well, my husband is going to be leaving me soon!
So the initiative included all these elements in what we call our 'egg basket' and we're trying to hatch all of them. It included everything from content creation to analytics to search engine optimisation, communications messaging and so on. The whole purpose is to do this customer engagement piece in the middle, looking at how all of these eggs and tools can help us go through acquisition, retention and conversion for our key audiences.
I've been working with representatives from across the business and I think this is very important. What we've done as an organisation is to engage from our legal team, our communications team, our sales and marketing, our contact centre, IT, and it's been the right move because all of those people contribute and help deliver all the elements.
So I'm going to give you a glimpse of the work we've been doing by highlighting one of the first projects we did, which was on membership renewals strategy. The annual May-September renewal drive is one of the most important and resource-intensive for CIPD. It's what brings the money in. In 2005, we put in place an online payment system and we sent our renewals reminders out through a series of posted mail-outs. There was a heavy administrative load, heavy impact on our contact centre and it really took a lot of the value-add we saw it, away from what we could provide our members if we didn't have such a heavy admin overload. So the aim for 2006 was to renew as many of our, at that point in time, 127,000 members more quickly and more efficiently and to make it much easier for them in the process as well.
There's three stages to the piece of work that we did. The first stage was email adoption. This part wasn't actually just focused on our membership renewals project, but it was essential. We wanted to use email to complement the direct marketing that we already did. So we needed to ensure that as many of our members as possible were actually used to receiving email from us. We needed the maximum numbers of members to register on our website. To actually go through the commerce process, you had to be registered. So we had to really look at how to achieve that.
So we reassessed our position on the legal opt-in initially. When we reviewed the law, it became clear that we had been very cautious as an organisation – we were very keen not to spam our members, look at the impact email might have in terms of our members opting out if we didn't do it efficiently. But what we understood when we actually did the review was that by being a member of the CIPD, there were some givens in terms of them implicitly being able to receive different types of email communication from us around their membership. At the start of 2006, we were only emailing about 30,000 of our members our weekly e-update. And this is a newsletter which included content, stuff about our key services, the resources we had to offer online, but obviously that was only going to a small portion of the 127,000 that we wanted to reach.
So we actually automatically included all our members in the e-update – we sent it to them all and we now have over 100,000 registered with it, of which 90 per cent are members. I think the interesting this is that when we sent it we were all very nervous about the impact it was going to have, but only 13 people unsubscribed, so it was really positive.
This flow diagram shows part of the process we went through to encourage them to register for our site, to adapt to email communication from us so that by the time the renewals came around, we actually had a lot of those people accepting email and registered with the site.
The second stage was actually working out how often and in what we form we were going to encourage our members to take email communication from us, and how we were going to encourage them to renew. This timeline shows the process we went through. Each orange rectangle at the bottom represents a piece of printed collateral that we sent out throughout the renewal cycle, and each green rectangle represents an email sent to encourage our members to renew their membership online.
The first two green emails highlight a report that was worth £50 that we used to encourage early renewal and the early renewal is represented by the green line. The third green email notified our members that it was time to renew. And the final two emails that were sent either side of the date that the membership lapsed for non-payers is represented by the red line. And the blue email at the top is the email that we sent specifically as a receipt for direct debit payers, which allowed them also to download the incentive report. We didn't want to lose our direct debit payers.
What this shows is that throughout the cycle we were doing different stages; we were doing direct marketing, we were doing email marketing and they were complementary – we didn’t actually remove any of them. And we also filtered, on the response rates to all of them so if people responded at a very early stage, they'd only get the direct mail.
This is the first email that went out. We made sure it provided information on the incentive report, that it explained how the online renewals process worked, that we included some of the benefits of membership so we reminded them of what they'd get if they did renew and why they should stay in membership. And, really, we used, through the research we'd done, the key messaging came from what we understood people really wanted from CIPD and why they renewed with us. So things like professional status and recognition, networking, opportunities, news and online information – we tried to include all of those in the content. The design was very visual. It was a letter format because we wanted it to complement the actual letter that we were sending out through direct marketing.
The third and final stage was building a wall of benefits and what we were looking to do here is understand how we could measure the success of the project itself. So this is the results. By the time we reached the 15th of June, which was three weeks before the actual renewal date, we had taken over £1million online and almost £2million in total, which was £1.1million more than at the same stage in the previous year.
The email really made a difference. On the day that the first one went out, 1400 people renewed and by the incentive cut-off point, 16,000 more members had renewed than at the same stage the previous year. By the actual date that the membership renewal was due we had taken £3.3 million, which was £1.8 million more than the year before. Finally, by the membership lapse date at the start of October we had taken £2.1million more than at the same stage the previous year.
Obviously we were thrilled by the impact of the project. We had renewed nearly 40,000 members before the renewal was actually required and in the process we brought in millions of pounds. However, we only really properly understood the full impact of the project itself once we had done a project review. We included an assessment of the website statistics, interview with the key stakeholders and we gathered feedback from our members. I'm going to give you a few bits of feedback that we received – they speak for themselves.
The streamlining of the renewals process reduced the customer inquiries and created a much less stressful working environment. This has meant we have been able to devote considerably more attention to those who did have a query and give them a more value-added experience.
We also noticed a high level of employee engagement. In terms of resourcing and staff levels our finance team has been able to cut back on the temporary staff they use and this year they won't be using them.
So how did we take that, which was around looking at the user experience, looking at the use of email communication and really move that forward in terms of not just touching our customers, but in terms of engaging them.
So this is a new membership benefits email, which we've just sent. It's a similar process to last year, but what this email does is actually convey the benefits of membership more effectively. It makes no mention of the membership renewals at all, it has gone out in advance of the membership renewals activity and out tactics are based on the fact that we believe that those members who have used our services before we get to the membership renewals cycle are actually going to be more likely to renew their membership with us.
If the email is successful what we're going to look at doing, if we have the resources, is to introduce this a quarterly email as we see it as key to maintaining the ongoing customer engagement through the 12-month cycle, so not just touching the customer at the point where we're saying 'we'd like to have your money', but actually reminding them all the way through the year about the important services they can take from us if they remain in membership.
We've also redesigned the email to better reflect the different life stages of the engagement strategy so that we convey the key messages better so we've been more upfront about the special offer – what you're going to get free. We've looked at doing more effective promotion around 'if you do it by a certain point in time', we've retained the element of what membership is going to include. Another key part has been personalising the email so people really feel that we are talking to them directly, and then a call to action with getting them to renew their membership now.
Later in the process, we're going to do some A-B testing to see what will work most effectively in the membership group. In addition, we've redesigned our landing page. It's going to change its messaging depending on where the engaging lifecycle of the member is.
I'd like to thank the team who worked on the programme and thank you for listening.
RICHARD SEDLEY:
I hope you found this podcast interesting and useful. You can find more podcasts and articles from the cScape Customer Engagement Unit on www.cscape.com. Until next time!