UTI Mutual Fund takes digital route to improve customer engagement

Treat your customers like your would-be-fiancée.In today’s age of break-neck competition, the statement holds true for every organization. In fact, organizations now widely acknowledge that customer experience truly has the potential to make or break a company. This fact was the prime reason that motivated UTI mutual fund to look for ways to improve customer engagement and in turn improve its conversions.

However, gaining customer attention and reaching the target audience is a challenge for mutual fund companies as they typically witness low customer interest and engagement. Given this scenario, UTI mutual fund was contemplating innovative ways to attract customers. The company decided to capitalize on the power of the online medium and invested in email marketing for the launch of its close-ended new fund offers (NFO) to draw the desired attention from its investors and distributors.

In order to achieve this, UTI worked with netCORE, a digital marketing solutions company.

REACHING OUT TO TARGET CUSTOMERS

After a thorough research of market scenarios which led to useful consumer insights on behavior patterns, netCORE implemented an innovative three-level multichannel target and re-target strategy for UTI mutual fund, where the email campaign was integrated with SMSes and calls to effectively communicate about the NFOs to the customers and enable them make an informed decision.

The customers were given an option to download the NFO details, invest online or request for more details. “Those who expressed interest in the email (by clicking) would automatically get a call from UTI Customer Care. This kind of personalized customer experience helps particularly in this industry as there is a lack of knowledge and understanding about the product.

Also, the email response triggered call helped in nudging the customers towards conversions. Those who ignored the email (did not open) were re-targeted by sending a gentle SMS reminder to check the email.

This multi-channel strategy was very effective in reaching out to more people and generating interest and the desired buzz around the product,” asserts Kalpit Jain, COO, netCORE.

The company noticed that the customers were highly responsive between 10 am to 12 noon, so the emails were sent out between this time to get maximum views. The subject line was also personalized to ensure that the users would read the email. The company used catchy and interesting subject lines like ‘Are you taking advantage of the current market situation?’ and ‘Invest in equity now and aim to accelerate your wealth creation,’ to gain maximum attention.

Sharing insights about the benefits of adopting the strategy, Kaushik Chakraborty, Senior Vice President— Alternate Channel & Contact Center,  UTI mutual funds, says, “Earlier we were able to target users based on their level of interest by opens and clicks. However, post our association with netCORE, we have now ensured that we do not spam users with too many mails. We only send reminder mails to them if they did not open our first mail. Additionally, we have also added immediate follow-up calls and SMS to the marketing strategy.”

In measurable terms, for the launch of its focused equity fund in August 2014, email campaign about the NFO sent to investors and distributor base received an open rate of 5.39% and 6.51% respectively. The non-openers were retargeted with SMS (notifying about the NFO email) and a second email was sent, which saw a phenomenal above industry open rate of 10.77% for distributors and 5.98% for investors.

Again the non-openers of this second email were retargeted in a similar way but the third email did not perform well, implying that this base of subscribers did not show interest in the NFO offering. A total of 2,096 calls were made to target the users who clicked on the email from the above series. Through this campaign where the consumers remained virtually engaged, UTI saw an increase in the response rates from investors by 162.69% and distributors by 97.2%. Further, the email promotion contributed to 25% of the total online sales.