Description

AGENCY: Harvest Digital
CLIENT NAME: Aion Bank
Campaign started: 03/01/2021
Campaign ended: 12/31/2021
Created at: September 1, 2021

BRIEF

Aion is a pan-European startup bank funded by Warburg – they chose Harvest to manage the digital marketing for the initial rollout into Belgium.

Belgium is a tough market even without a pandemic, with three languages and some very strong regional characteristics to take account of.

In spite of the challenges, it has been exhilarating to launch a new brand, win new customers and hit some aggressive growth targets.

STRATEGY:

High performance digital marketing relies on accurate and timely data.

That’s relatively easy to get in a vanilla ecommerce environment, but a loan application in Belgium has to be approved by the bank’s underwriters AND the Belgian Central Bank. So a major challenge has been joining the dots and making sure that we can track not just loan applications, but the success rate.

After that, then God is in the detail. We have focused on every aspect of our campaigns, from targeting, to creative, to bid management and budget control, to squeeze value out of every stage.

To give two examples, there is no ‘control’ creative in this account. Instead we have tested and optimized creative for each specific target audience. (And because this is Belgium, we need to take account of two languages and quite different cultural sensibilities).

Another example is budget management. Even in a mature market like finance, media costs can vary by as much as 50% from day to day. So we don’t cap budgets in case we lose out on good days – instead we manage budgets really carefully with a close eye on daily performance.

RESULTS:

When we took over the account, acquisition activity was highly inefficient – for instance the cost of writing a new loan was over EUR1,000. Within 8 months we had reduced this to consistently under EUR100.

The quality of leads improved by 57%, and average loan value increased by 75%.On new bank members, we reduced the cost of new customer acquisition by 83% in 8 months.

One final statistic: when we took over the account, each Euro of marketing spend generated eight Euros of revenue. Within eight months, each Euro of media was generating 35 Euros value.

DOWNLOADS: