We’ve analysed the more than 655 million marketing interactions that took place through our Leadify platform in 2019 and here are the facts from the direct marketing stats that you need to know:
the Sales
Leadify proved to be hugely successful for our clients in 2019, who ran over 500 lead generation campaigns with us. These clients saved thousands of hours of campaign management admin, simply by using our tips and long running campaign structure.
- SMS Marketing remains one of the most effective conversion channels for financial services lead generation.
- Over 1.6 Million sales were made, generating over R110 Million worth of lead sales into the financial services sector in South Africa.
- Customers in the loans marketing space created payouts valued at over R300 Million.
the Contacts
Ethical marketing is key when using SMS and Email marketing. That’s why it is vital to abide by the WASPA and DMASA regulations, which Leadify enforces into our system programmatically. This means that companies are protected from mistakes like we’ve seen in the past: ‘Uber breaches WASPA rules’ and ‘Old Mutual ads breaks the rules’.
Contacts that are imported into Leadify are always marked against the relevant DMA optouts. Consumers that respond with an optout keyword are also added to a global optout list which stops further marketing to them.
We protect client data tightly through a myriad of security measures, ensuring the protection of personal information as required by POPIA.
the Engagement
The direct marketing stats show that the most effective channel in terms of generating actual sales, has always been SMS marketing. This is because the call to action is an extremely simple one: consumers reply with an affirmative if they’re interested in the product. This engagement is then routed straight through to a call centre agent who contacts the consumer within a reasonable time frame.
Here are some other engagement findings from 2019:
- Reverse Billing has become a legislated requirement for the majority of insurance marketing. We recommend that it’s used for all marketing, because it’s an important ethical marketing consideration in terms of protecting consumers.
- Last year, clients opting to use Reverse Billing saved consumers R375k in opt-out costs alone. There is also evidence emerging showing that Reverse Billing improves response rate and sales.
- We’ve also seen an increase in the usage of web links in SMS. This has given rise to the increase in responsive web forms for lead data collection.
- The latest smartphone technology from Android and Apple creates preview windows, which show a summary of the web link content within the messaging app. We use this as an indication of how many contacts open an SMS, since the preview is only fetched if the SMS is opened.
Email marketing still has extremely high engagement rates. The challenge is that attrition from open to click to web to form-fill remains high (which is why we include features that help mitigate this attrition). For example, the click-to-call functionality can be used to direct clicks straight into an API, and the link trigger functionality allows you to pass through customer information to form-fill pages.
the Direct Marketing Stats Pie
Life Insurance dominated a quarter of all direct marketing stats shown in Leadify in 2019, indicating that in the market in general, Life Insurance dominated marketing in financial services. This is corroborated by some historical insurance ad spend data.
Various car insurance products stack up next to Life, and the finance side of things then make up the balance, with a touch of retail marketing.
We look forward to how these stats evolve in 2020, and to finding new ways for our clients to reach their markets even more successfully.
Get in touch to find out more about these Direct Marketing Stats
Contact us! for more information on our 2019 Leadify in action report, or Sign Up!