Fulcrum Builds a Foundation of 6.5 Million Active Customers
Challenge: Build Multi-Year Relationships with Valuable Customers
A leading manufacturer of blood glucose monitors came to Fulcrum several years ago with a problem: Customer attrition was high. Their sector sold blood glucose monitors in the same way that razor blade manufacturers sell razors; the manufacturer made its meters widely available at low or no cost, but could only generate revenues from the sales of test strips. The manufacturer needed a way to engage customers directly.
So Fulcrum set out to build multi-year relationships with the manufacturer’s most valuable customers.
Approach: Deploy Fulcrum’s Customer State Technology to Build a Foundation
The first hurdle Fulcrum had to overcome was creating a customer data foundation upon which to run its marketing models. The manufacturer only had call center records, product registration cards, and other scattered information to work with, but Fulcrum designed several data collection and management building blocks to ensure that the manufacturer gathered data consistently and fed it into a centralized data warehouse that Fulcrum could manage.
The second half of Fulcrum’s efforts centered around designing a longitudinal, multi-faceted retention strategy that would use a combination of telephone outreach, direct mail, and e-marketing techniques to engage customers.
This complex program was powered by Fulcrum’s customer state machine technology, which was tightly integrated with the customer database and driven by advanced analytical tools.
Research showed that new customers often needed information on how to use the meters and how to manage their disease, so early-life communications focused more on proactively engaging the customer with the product and the brand. For more established customers, the program shifted to preempting competitive threats. Our sophisticated statistical models determined which customers should be offered free meter upgrades to prevent switching behavior.
Result: 6.5 Million Active Customers
The results were impressive: the database that Fulcrum created expanded from a hundred thousand records of relatively low quality to over 6.5 million active customers with multiple years of history. This rich database in turn drove marketing programs that the manufacturer’s own finance department credits with producing over $40 million in incremental profits annually, and it was a key element in the company’s growth in market share, which climbed significantly after the program was launched.
In addition to the high financial return on investment, the program also won the National Center for Database Marketing’s Gold Excellence award, the industry’s highest honor.