When I took over the Verizon client, people in my creative department didn't want to work on it. The first thing I did was to assemble the team and give them a forum to air their issues. Once we had them on the table, I started creating strategies to overcome them and make Verizon an account our creative team wanted to help.
Next, I made sure our team of writers, designers and coders had a personal relationship with each Verizon stakeholder. My purpose was to open lines of communication and personalize our efforts. Finally, our team studied the Verizon products and services we were serving to make sure we knew them better than the Verizon stakeholders. This allowed us to regain our credibility and triple our revenue with them in two short years.
We were one of three agencies working on Verizon's CRM work, but we were the one considered the source for innovative strategy and outstanding creative.
THE VERIZON CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE
As the strategic agency handling digital CRM, we were responsible for identifying, understanding, and creating communications consistent with Verizon's lifecycle.
A summary of their lifecycle (prior to the slow death of contracts).
I worked with Verizon to identify and then build the communications to support their ideal lifecycle plan.
CUSTOMER ONBOARDING
As agency owner of Verizon's onboarding program, we developed, improved upon and personalized their customer communications. Each touch one receives is personalized based on, among other things, whether they are on a new contract, renewing, adding a line or switching devices.
The full decision tree possible if someone were to receive every possible email in Verizon's digital onboarding process.
MONTHLY NEWSLETTER
Each month, we sent up to 15 million newsletter emails to existing customers. Our goal was to provide useful information and build a relationship with the customer. My team was responsible for content strategy, targeting, and creative execution.
The core newsletter was dynamic and personalized, bringing in different content based on the data we had for each recipient.
Unengaged customers weren't opening the main newsletter, so we created this single-issue postcard version directed at that category. This was the "unengaged with families" version.
This was the "unengaged non-family" version focused on wearables. The new version increased engagement and conversion.
TRANSACTIONALS
After winning Verizon's transactional email work, we collected more than 1,200 emails as part of our discovery. Our goal was to reduce this size to a simple dynamic template that would be personalized and responsive on any mobile device. We streamlined message variations and consolidated the email variations to one fifth of the original number.
Before...
After...
SMART REWARDS LOYALTY PROGRAM
In July of 2014, Verizon launched a four-region pilot loyalty program - Smart Rewards. From the very first meeting, my team worked very closely with the Rewards stakeholder to develop the program strategy, including rollout, communication, targeting, message cadence and creative execution. The performance of our creative assets has consistently outperformed expectations - from opens, to registrations and signups, to program participation and conversion.
We led the strategy and creative development across the entire Smart Rewards program.
This communication was focused on giving customers ideas on how they could use their accumulated Smart Rewards points. Other communications included program introduction, registration encouragement, instructions on how to accumulate points, and highlights for how to use them.
DYNAMIC & PERSONALIZED DIGITAL COMMUNICATION STRUCTURE
With the large amount of data Verizon captures on its customers, we were able to make highly personalized and dynamic communications. The challenge was how to illustrate all of the possible options. This is one example of how we'd structure our work so Verizon stakeholders could gain an understanding of the final deliverable possibilities.
We were having issues with our creative being shown to a variety of Verizon executives with no context. We developed this approach to showing off our work. It included context and rationale for each pod and every possible version.