Commonbond Case Analysis

Case Analysis: CommonBond

Yuvraj Johri

Introduction:

The case study is an analysis of CommonBond’s email marketing strategy which they have been following. CommonBond is a Wharton Incubator product, which provides products such as student loans and refinancing of existing loans. They have been following a dedicated email marketing plan helped partly by the thousands of customer email ids stored since the inception of the firm. They have been using email marketing for communication of brand story across multiple marketing channels, especially online.

Current Strategy:

The current strategy followed by the firm, involves creating 4 email lists that are as follows:

Members:                 Content only

Pipeline:                Transactional

Events:                        Thank you responses and invites to new events.

Friends & Family:          News and milestones only

Also, a 3 month rolling calendar is followed to allow streamlining of operations / content and dates while trying to target specific users with content that interests them.

Issues:

The issues that are faced by the organization is whether creation of new products will need the creation of a new email communications strategy and the issue of differentiation of content based on target customer interests.

Recommendations:

1. A 3 month email calendar is too big a time target, which will cause issues in planning and possibly cause multiple changes and adjustments to the strategy causing editing and recreating of the calendar. The email calendar should be shortened to 4 weeks.
2. An entire new line for new product launches should be established and sent as a cross segment target acquisition strategy to all the existing customer lists. It should be followed up with a comparison to see if the new strategy can reach or exceed the levels of relatively high open and click through rates.
3. CommonBond could expand their current campaigns outside of email marketing, such as social media platforms. Doing this would open up the company to new potential customers and opportunities.
4. CommonBond should also consider the benefit accrued from the Social Media Multiplier effect such as directly engage with customers, build brand affinity and share content such as articles, photos and videos at low cost. Some other benefits would include, but not be restricted to, crowdsourcing of ideas, improving employee engagement, enriching company’s culture.
5. Marketers continue to make social a priority and will boost their social media investments from 10.6% to 20.9% of budgets over the next five years, according to the most recent results of The CMO Survey. CommonBond should definitely look into engaging this new frontier.