Norwich & Peterborough Building Society

The background

Norwich and Peterborough Building Society (N&P) is the 9th largest building society in the UK, with a strong branch network across the East, and key competition from the big banks who sit on the same high streets.

Voted best Building Society in the PFA Awards 2009/10, N&P has enjoyed strong growth, through a strategy of offering a broad product range that extends far beyond the standard mortgages and savings products offered by other building societies.

The marketing challenge

Marketing activities have traditionally focussed on offline channels, moving to email primarily for member communications rather than marketing purposes.

Ben Meadows, Online Marketing Manager for N&P says “We’d done some ad hoc email marketing campaigns, in particular to our commercial broker sector. But we knew the real opportunity lay in growing our customer email database and developing targeted email campaigns for both retention, cross sell and acquisition.”

The decision was made to replace their existing email service provider with a new provider who could actively help them grow their email marketing.

The Brief

N&P invited dotMailer to show how we would help them to steadily grow their returns from email marketing through:

The solution

Following a wide invitation to tender, N&P chose dotMailer as their email service provider. We provided a lifetime user license to dotMailer Enterprise, half a day’s training in using the platform and email marketing best practice, and custom ‘sent from’ addresses.

The campaign and the results

The N&P marketing team created their first customer email marketing campaign to launch their latest online saver product to existing Society customers.

The email creative featured a strong text headline focussed on the offer, to maximise the number of recipients who would see the offer, even with the email delivered with images turned off by the email client.

Two very clear and prominent calls to action buttons helped to drive click throughs, whilst an image of a happy saver helped to add human interest to the email.

The email was sent to an initial group of 23,500 customers. The main campaign achieved an open rate of 23% and a click-to-open rate of 13%. The campaign generated a significant inflow of funds into the society with over 100 accounts opened as result of the mailing.

The next steps

Following the outstanding success of their inaugural cross-sell email campaign, N&P have gone on to use dotMailer to create successful triggered email campaigns targeting e-bond customers who are approaching their renewal dates. The next steps, says Ben, is to use dotMailer’s contact form creator to build an online preference centre and begin targeting and personalising campaigns more precisely.