The Islamic Bank of Britain (IBB) is a trailblazer, offering its customers the first wholly Sharia compliant, FSA-authorised retail financial services in the UK. It delivers friendly, inclusive and personal services to its customers in areas such as savings, current accounts and property finance.
Seeking to seize new opportunities, IBB works with Experian Marketing Services to better identify, understand, attract, retain and provide value to its customers and prospective customers — and achieve significant returns on marketing investment.
Founded in 2004, IBB is well into its start-up phase and pursuing enhanced profitability and continual growth. Following a series of reviews aimed at achieving these goals, the bank undertook a transformation programme to make it ever-more focused on its customers and their needs.
IBB identified gaps in its marketing strategy: one of the fundamental challenges was to identify their audience and, consequently, understand them. The bank had yet to define its market beyond the basic core ‘UK adult Muslim’ category. With such a broad target, marketing activity was similarly unfocused.
This lack of customer insight wasn’t the result of a lack of data, but rather a failure to capture and analyse information effectively. IBB needed to set data at the heart of its marketing strategy, to: define its market; identify and quantify the groups and individuals within it; and gain greater insight into the social, economic and demographic characteristics of these groups.
IBB launched a competitive tender to source a partner who could best leverage their data. IBB’s Tim Sinclair said, “From a list of the leading providers, Experian emerged as the clear winner. Their reputation was an obvious differentiator, but so too was their empathy and understanding of where we were, what we wanted to achieve and their vision of what success could bring us.”
Working closely with Tim and the marketing team, Experian identified Financial Strategy Segments (FSS) as the platform that would deliver on objectives. Analysing the UK adult population, FSS brings a wealth of insight, with data on age, marital status, household income, home ownership status, creditworthiness and online financial behaviour.
With IBB’s unique and highly specialised target audience, the Experian team understood that purely financial aspects of their customer base wouldn’t deliver the precise targeting needed. Consequently, FSS was combined with Experian Mosaic Origins, which profiles areas and communities by name origin, ethnicity and language. It classifies first and last names according to the part of the world from which their forebears are most likely to have originated, and each name is placed into one of 200 Origins types.
It’s a highly tailored solution that allows IBB to identify its highest value customers and those like them, gain insight into their behaviours and financial needs, factor in regional and local differences and engage with them ever more effectively.
Experian FSS and Mosaic Origins has identified that there are 1.5 million UK adult Muslims, allowing IBB to quantify the gross size of their core market. This is further refined into 14 household groups and 50 household types, giving the granular detail the bank needs to truly understand and engage with customers and prospective Muslim customers.
With measurement a key part of the Experian solution, IBB is seeing significant improvement in its direct and email marketing campaigns. In 2012:
- Direct marketing response rates for prospective customers were up to five times higher than the target.
- Direct Marketing response rates for existing customers rose up to 6.75 per cent higher than the industry standard.
- Email marketing lead generation rocketed by 179 per cent.
- Sales in home finance products jumped by 63 per cent.
- Sales in long term savings products grew by 43 per cent.
- Return on investment is over £2 for every £1 spent.
Tim Sinclair said, “Experian has helped us to embed data into our marketing strategies and it has rapidly repaid our commitment and investment. We have achieved a huge amount in just one year, but with Experian’s ongoing support we know that we can tap the full potential of our specialist core target market.”
“Experian has helped us to embed data into our marketing strategies and it has rapidly repaid our commitment and investment. We have achieved a huge amount in just
one year, but with Experian’s ongoing support we know that we can tap the full potential of our specialist core target market.”
Tim Sinclair, Head of Marketing & Online Channels, IBB