Compare Club increases LTV and improves time savings

Highlights

• Cost per enquiry lowered by 9.5% for specific customer segments by using Hightouch to build look-alike audiences
• Increased LTV, retention, and loyalty by operating in a more customer-centric fashion with Snowflake, Braze, and Hightouch
• Engineering time lowered from weeks to minutes using Hightouch to send data to ad networks

The Challenge

With multiple different websites and customer touchpoints, Compare Club collected data from a number of disparate sources, but everything was stitched together through Excel Sheets and there was no easy way to measure effectiveness or do business monitoring/reporting accurately. Understanding the customer database and other basic demographic data was nearly impossible.

Business teams such as sales, marketing, or support had no easy way to access any information, so the data team was often tasked with building custom integrations to various marketing tools such as Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Salesforce, and so on. However, these custom integrations could take over three weeks to build and they were very brittle and difficult to maintain.

In addition to this, Salesforce Marketing Cloud was creating challenges because it was not handling all of the multi-channel touchpoints that were crucial given that Compare Club connects with customers over phone calls, emails, SMS, and so on.

The Solution

Snowflake as a centralized data platform

With this in mind, Head of Data and Analytics Ryan Newsome laid out several criteria for a new cloud data platform.

These factors led Newsome to Snowflake:

• Simplicity and ease of use
• Speed and performance
• Maintenance and implementation time

We did a side-by-side comparison of Google BigQuery and Snowflake, but we ended up choosing Snowflake due to its speed, ease of use, and ability to spin up individual ad hoc warehouses. The speed of Snowflake is intense. I’ve never used any data platform as fast as Snowflake. I can run my queries in 10 seconds and I don’t need a dedicated data engineer to keep everything up and running.

Ryan Newsome

Head of Data and Analytics

•

Compare Club

Snowflake helps Compare Club consolidate all of its customer data into a centralized and fully managed platform, creating a unified customer profile and enabling self-serve analytics through Tableau. In addition to this, Compare Club is also able to access unique data sets through Snowflake Data Marketplace and also leverage Snowflake’s data sharing feature to send and receive data to different Snowflake accounts.

Activating data with Hightouch and Reverse ETL

With all of its customer data and unique data models in a single location, Compare Club needed a way for its various business teams (sales, marketing, support, and so on) to take action on the data within Snowflake.

We got to the point where we started identifying really useful information and creating exceptional data models in Snowflake, but we wanted to activate this information across our different business teams and that is where we saw a gap in our tech stack.

Ryan Newsome

Head of Data and Analytics

•

Compare Club

Hightouch arose as a front-runner solution to tackle the challenge of sending the data within Snowflake to Compare Club’s various business tools. Compare Club quickly began using Hightouch to sync customer data directly to Salesforce to assist with better call prioritization and to give individual agents more visibility around specific customers and prospects.

Lifecycle marketing campaigns with Braze

With Snowflake powering analytics, and Hightouch already syncing customer data directly to Salesforce, Compare Club also wanted to leverage this data from a marketing standpoint and design a two-way conversation to nurture its customers throughout their entire lifecycle journey based on the specific actions they take along the way. Knowing this, Compare Club turned to Braze to design an entirely new conversational experience and increase the number of meaningful interactions with customers.

Compare Club uses Braze to manage a number of different marketing campaigns across various touchpoints such as email and SMS based on the unique actions of each individual customer (such as phone calls they have with their sales team) to create relevant experiences tailored in real-time toward the needs of each unique customer.

Results

Near real-time reporting

Using Snowflake, Compare club is able to expose data directly to Tableau within five minutes from real-time.

Higher sales output

By creating a lead scoring model in Snowflake and using Hightouch to sync that data to Salesforce as an additional field, Compare Club’s sales team can identify which contacts are more likely to pick up their phone. Using this information calls can be prioritized in the dialler and all of Compare Club’s individual agents now meeting their required quota or surpassing it.

Increased revenue per lead for paid ads

With CPLs (cost per lead) rising, Compare Club leveraged Hightouch to create a custom audience using a list of customers who purchased specific policies and met defined criteria. Syncing these audiences to Facebook for ad retargeting led to an increase in revenue and lower CPL.

Hightouch Audiences is super easy to use and set up—you click a couple of buttons and the audience is made. Your data team often becomes a bottleneck, but not anymore. The audience builder allows our acquisition team to do the work themselves.

Ryan Newsome

Head of Data and Analytics

•

Compare Club

Multi-touch lifecycle marketing campaigns

Braze has enabled Compare Club’s marketing team to create customized campaigns across multiple touchpoints based on tactical segmentation and audiences powered by Hightouch. Using Braze, the marketing team can create customized experiences for customers (for example, users who visited the website and received a quote but never purchased). With Hightouch syncing data directly to Braze, the marketing team can easily experiment and iterate at a moment's notice, without ever having to go through the data team.

With Braze, the marketing team is able to follow each customer’s journey from lead to opportunity, product sold, post-sale, and customer retention. Every interaction is tailored based on the conversations that happen across phone and support messages so that each customer can have relevant offers tailored to them across Compare Club’s websites and messaging channels such as email, SMS, push notifications.

We were worried about migrating from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Braze. Hightouch made it easy to get immediate value out of Braze. If we didn’t have Hightouch, Braze never would have been approved.

Ryan Newsome

Head of Data and Analytics

•

Compare Club

Future

Turning insights into actions

Success for Compare Club means creating customized experiences and offers tailored toward the needs of every customer. The combination of Snowflake, Hightouch, and Braze provides Compare Club with a scalable technology stack that can tackle use cases for years to come. Furthermore, Snowflake Data Marketplace enables Compare Club to continually identify and leverage new data sets in delivering more personalized experiences to its customers.

We didn’t choose an off-the-shelf CDP because a substantial amount of engineering is required to get it up and running, and at the end of the day, it is just a second source of truth. Why would we buy a CDP when all of our data modeling is already being done directly in Snowflake?

Ryan Newsome

Head of Data and Analytics

•

Compare Club