Client: CIBA Vision/Alcon Laboratories
Agency: The Agency Inside Harte-Hanks
Objective: Build brand loyalty and drive revenue by delivering a personalized experience based on strategic customer insights
The Aim: Loyalty + revenue = customer engagement. It seems like a simple enough equation, but as any marketer could tell you, it’s no easy task.
The first step in building true engagement is to know your customer—a deceptively simple precept, but one that contact lens brand CIBA Vision, which merged with vision care company Alcon Laboratories in 2011, applies with gusto.
“It’s about communicating in the way people want to be communicated with—that’s why there are preference centers,” says Julie Collins, director of global digital marketing at Alcon Laboratories. “[Consumers] choose the how and the when, and then we’re really respectful of how often we communicate with them based on what we learn—it’s very much a one-to-one marketing vehicle for us.”
With an eye toward driving revenue and building long-term customer relationships, Alcon Laboratories called on The Agency Inside Harte-Hanks to transform Eyefile, the brand’s free lens trial program, into a robust CRM tool packed with customer data that CIBA Vision could use to craft extremely personalized, hyper-targeted messaging based on specific needs and stated preferences.
Currently, Eyefile consolidates information from the dozen or more CIBA Vision and Alcon brand sites into a single digital nerve center, which allows the brands’ marketers to stay organized when it comes to collecting and using customer data. Visitors to any associated CIBA Vision Web property are invited to join the Eyefile family.
“When you register, the information we collect about consumers, [including email address, basic vision health facts, name, geographic location, what type of lenses they wear, what brand of lens they use, etc.], drives everything that happens from that moment forward,” says Michele Fitzpatrick, EVP of strategy and marketing at The Agency Inside Harte-Hanks. “And then there’s a whole variety of segmentations that goes on behind the scenes, based on how the consumer answered certain questions, to ensure they receive only personally relevant communications.”
The Strategy: When Fitzpatrick says personally relevant, she means it: Customer data derived from Eyefile feeds three dynamic email communication streams with more than 800 different content variations and combinations. The acquisition stream focuses on reeling in first-time contact lens wearers, while the conversion stream targets contact lens users who aren’t currently using CIBA Vision products with messaging designed to encourage them to switch. Finally, the retention stream concentrates on keeping the contact lens experience top-notch for existing customers.
All email templates in the Eyefile system are modular, meaning that they were designed to be able to stretch or contract to accommodate highly variable content being pulled based on the changing personal information in a customer’s profile. Images are automatically selected based on their appeal to particular age groups.
The result is a harmonious union between “technology, design, and content strategy,” Fitzpatrick says. “It means your emails don’t look the same every time. The container of the email changes based on what’s being delivered at any given moment.”
The Backend: Considering the complexity of what’s happening behind the scenes, all that customers experience is simplicity. It’s easy to sign up, and once registered, personalized email begins to appear in their inbox.
But while Harte-Hanks and CIBA Vision currently have more than 800—and growing—content variations available in their database, they didn’t get there in a day.
“How do you get started on something big like this? Well, there’s a phrase: How do you eat an elephant? Answer: One bite at a time,” Fitzpatrick says. “We didn’t start out with 800 variations, we started out with one family of brands and we expanded over time. This system was built for scale—but it also requires discipline to grow.”
The Results: Eyefile, which continues to develop, broke the million-customer mark in mid-June. According to Harte-Hanks, the campaign has beaten CIBA Vision’s revenue and ROI goals by 80%.
But without personalized, relevant messaging, Eyefile wouldn’t have gained the kind of traction it has.
“We tend to look at our communications and ask, ‘How would you feel if you were having this conversation with a friend?’ You don’t walk up to a friend and start blabbering about how great you are,” Collins says. “So, if you’re truly interested in expanding your relationship with people beyond just shouting about how fabulous you are, there has to be sensitivity integrated in there—and the digital space has made that not just an option, but something that’s preferred and will become more and more the expected thing.”
The Takeaway: Eyefile’s continued success is a reflection of its stress on customer centricity and the brand’s close collaboration with the Harte-Hanks team, Collins says. If Eyefile wasn’t giving consumers what they want, then they’d either opt out or ignore the emails altogether.
“People have a lot of other things to do with their lives, and they don’t need to sign up for one more extraneous program,” says Collins, who notes that there was some internal skepticism when she first floated the idea of a CRM system for CIBA Vision.
“[It] was one of the biggest questions I got all through the process: ‘Do you really believe that people want to engage at all with the manufacturer of their contact lenses and their lens care provider? We don’t think so,’ ” she says. “But what we discovered is they actually do, if it’s in a way that’s good for them, respectful of their needs, and also gives them something of value that they think is worthwhile.”
