Peer to Peer Business Lender

The Objective

Our client has a new twist on a traditional business finance product. Our objective was quite simple: to help acquire new customers that would pass credit checks and become an active borrower.

The Challenge

Identifying businesses to target is quite easy. Identifying businesses that meet credit criteria, are likely to have a propensity to borrow, and for whom contact details for the decision makers can be found is not.

List purchase in the past had meant targeting the businesses that list vendors could supply, not the businesses our client wanted to target. Lists were also notoriously out of date and poor quality.

How We Did It

We took on board our client’s challenges and created an entirely bespoke targeting process to identify qualifying SMEs and then research the email addresses of decision makers.

A full email marketing service was then implemented to contact and nurture those decision makers, including:

• Managing Pardot (the marketing automation component of the Salesforce suite)
• Writing personalised email copy aligned to the prospect’s sector and circumstances
• Building dedicated landing pages to maintain the personalised experience for the prospect
• Writing and programming the automated nurturing sequences aligned to the recipients’ behaviours
• Implementing lead scoring to identify the most engaged prospects
• Dovetailing the process with the sales and outbound calling teams to focus their efforts on the most engaged prospects.

We also

• Created and implemented monthly email correspondence with brokers and introducers
• Tailored the Google Analytics set-up for full monitoring of the sales funnel
• Initiated research to support unique content generation and to fuel the personalised email copy
• Ran the social media programme for a period to create the template for the client to follow
• Ran direct mail activity alongside the email marketing
• Fully analysed their PPC activity and made recommendations for improvement
• Provided general strategic counsel to the marketing team

The Results

Over a period of 12 months, we saw lead volumes from direct marketing increase by almost 80%, but more importantly the quality of those leads, defined as those passing credit checks increased five-fold.

Email open rates were consistently over 20% and click through rates around 9%, creating a constant flow of leads for the sales teams to follow up on. There was a direct and noticeable correlation between the number of campaigns that were sent out and the volume of lending written by the business.