Optimizing the personal loan process

The process of taking out a personal loan can last for weeks, and an average user compares from 5 to 15 different financial institutions. In this context, Cetelem made a great investment in traffic generation campaigns leading to a web simulator that makes online contracting possible. However, only 1.2% of the more than 500,000 monthly visits ended up leading to a contract, while 80% were left in the simulator, and from the 20% that started the contracting process, 14% didn’t complete the form.

The challenge was to capitalize on the strong investment the brand was making to generate awareness and consideration by exploiting the large number of visits it managed to bring each month to the website. Our objective was:

• Increase the lead conversion ratio

• Reduce acquisition costs – cost per lead and cost per financing

Our strategic decision focused on taking advantage of and exploiting the knowledge obtained from the individual data of visitors to Cetelem’s website, both inferred and declared, and reaching out to the users again with a personalized communication that would allow us to showcase the most relevant differential advantages for them on an individual level.

The creative strategy focused on maximizing individualized communication. To achieve this, we used more than 50 data dimensions that allowed us to generate more than 300,000 different communication models, customizing variables such as sex of the user, age, reason for the loan, amount requested, resulting fee, and Cetelem’s messages of superiority, which depends on the user’s bank, work situation, income level or communications history if they were already a Cetelem client.

This enabled us to evolve the traditional concept of retargeting by developing banners that were personalized to each user, and we managed to enrich the programmatic purchase strategy with hyper-segmented information of users we wanted to reach again.

The success of the project was measured by comparing three groups and analyzing completed contracting processes and closed funding after the candidates’ first visits, which included users not reached through retargeting, users reached again through generic creativity, and users reached again through individualized creativity.

Comparing users reached through individualized creativity to the unreached control group, we observed a 9.5% of incremental sales attributable exclusively to the impact of the project; 40.1% increase in the conversion ratio to global financing; 15.3% reduction in cost per lead; 11.4% increase in the average amount financed (equivalent to an additional 4 million euros); and improvement of 10 points in the proportion of exploitable forms, significantly reducing the time and costs of processing low value requests

If we compare the users who saw individualized creativity versus those who saw generic creativity, there was a greater number of pre-approved processes – a 17.5% improvement in the ratio and 4.9% increase in the average amount financed.