Case Studies: Southwest Bank of Texas B2C Email Marketing Campaign

The Challenge
Southwest Bank of Texas is a leading Texas bank with more than $7 billion in assets and 250,000 customers. A technology innovator, Southwest Bank is continually seeking to add value and enhance customer relationships through products and services that make their customers more efficient. As a result, Southwest Bank set out to increase the number of customers using its online billpay service.

Email can be a great asset to those companies that follow best practices and adhere to legal requirements for responsible opt-in email marketing. When Southwest Bank of Texas was looking for a partner to help them effectively announce their free billpay service in an efficient, appropriate and profitable manner, they turned to Spur Digital.

The Solution
Spur Digital helped develop and implement a targeted email marketing campaign to promote the bank’s Free Billpay service to existing customers. Results from the campaign were compelling, dramatically boosting the number of billpay customers.

Campaign Overview
Spur developed and implemented an email marketing campaign to announce the free billpay services to the bank’s online banking customers. Spur started by creating a targeted email announcement that contained links to landing pages on the bank’s site that instructed customers how to use and enroll in the billpay service.

Spur designed the landing page to provide a graphical step-by-step overview of how to use the bank’s billpay service. Customers that were interested in enrolling were shown how to enroll on another instructional overview page. Customers were then invited to enroll in the program.

Spur sent the message to the bank’s customers via white-listed (what does that mean?)mail servers. Spur then provided comprehensive tracking and reporting of campaign metrics including:

• Messages sent
• Bounced messages
• Opened messages
• Click-throughs
• Visits to the “how to use billpay” page
• Visits to the “how to enroll” page
• Enrollments
• Campaign ROI

The Results
Results of the campaign were extraordinary. Over the course of the campaign, the bank increased its number of billpay customers by 28%. Below is a summary of the campaign metrics:

• Click-through rate exceeded 23%(1)
• Enrollment rate exceeded 44%(2)
• Net response rate equaled 3.1%(3)
• ROI exceeded 3000% (4)

• 23% of those that opened the message clicked through to one of the landing pages
• 44% of those that visited the landing page enrolled in billpay
• 3.1% of the target audience enrolled in billpay
• ROI = NPV of campaign divided by cost of campaign

Results from the campaign greatly exceeded those of direct mail, which typically yield 0.3% - 0.8% response rates. The billpay campaign yielded 5X greater results while saving the bank 80% of the cost of printing and postage costs.

Spur Digital’s Role
As a full-service solution provider, Spur Digital managed all aspects, including:

• Developing the campaign plan
• Identifying, engaging and structuring agreements with Partners
• Development of web media – email announcements and landing pages
• Comprehensive tracking and reporting of marketing metrics and business results
• Conducting a customer survey to measure the impact on brand loyalty
• Measuring financial impact and ROI