CLIENT CASE Essent

The impact of
personalisation

The implementation of a tracking system, clustering visitors and acting upon their interests.

About
Essent

Essent is the leading energy supplier in the Netherlands with the brands Essent, Energiedirect, Vandebron and about 20 service partners (regional companies that provide maintenance and sales of insulation, solar panels, charging stations and central heating boilers).

They service over 2.5 million households and are part of the E.on group (one of the largest energy holdings in Europe).

Moving towards
personalised commmunication

Essent decided to implement a Data Management Platform (DMP).

The experts from Stitchd were involved in the entire process: from drawing up the requirements for the RFP to transforming the way of working within the marketing department.

USE CASE

PSV Fans

EnergieDirect was the shirt sponsor of the football club PSV at that time. They were looking for a way to incorporate that sponsorship into their online acquisition strategy. We synced the fanbase of PSV with EnergieDirect’s customers base and installed DMP tracking pixels on PSV owned websites to understand which of the EnergieDirect website visitors were likely to be a PSV fan. Those people were shown a personalised offer instead of the default cash-back offer: when signing a new contract or prolonging an existing one, they were given a PSV shirt. This personalisation resulted in an increase of 23% in signed/prolonged contracts.

"I have enjoyed working with Stitchd for many years and with every issue (such as the implementation of DMP and online customer recognition) I could count on both the excellent content knowledge and the hands-on mentality. This ensured that we did not just stick to consultancy but delivered all projects."

Rob Van De Wiel

Digital Platform Expert

Key points

Increasing the impact of personalisation

We noticed that only 35% of the website visitors could be recognised as a customer. Therefore, a new project was started where several “identification touchpoints” were defined. The project team worked actively on the tracking of those touchpoints and involved the entire organisation to be aware of these identification opportunities. After a year, 65% of website visitors could be identified. Resulting in much larger segment sizes that could be personalised for.

Migrating from DMP to CDP

As the personalisation use cases matured, we came up against the limitations of the DMP platform. There was a need for a 360° view on customer level and Essent started exploring the Customer Data Platform market. Essent already had a data lake in place where all customer data sources were integrated, so they decided to build CDP functionalities on top of it.

An evolving partnership

As the maturity within the organisation grew, our role as partner changed: we evolved from staffing partner to sparring partner. By training internal employees (both with formal training and on-the-job knowledge transfer) they were able to take over our function as product owner and power users of the DMP/CDP. Today, we are consulted on an ad hoc basis to delve into specific issues or to reflect together on the evolutions within the MarTech landscape.

The role of a product owner

Also, the other use cases of the pilot proved successful, after which a full implementation and configuration followed. Once the platform was in place, our role evolved from implementation partner to product owner: we took on the maintenance of the DMP and promoted its use to various stakeholders throughout the organisation. Over time, the segments populated via the DMP were used for marketing, sales and customer services purposes.

With the personalisation use cases at Essent we proved that understanding customers' interests and being able to respond to them in a relevant way, can have a huge impact on sales figures.