The Czech Republic’s oldest savings bank proved it was also the most innovative when it used Custom Audiences targeting to reach mortgage buyers on Facebook, generating over $63 million in revenue.
In June 2014, the resurgent housing market prompted the Czech Republic’s oldest savings bank, Česká spořitelna, to turn to Facebook as an innovative channel to sell mortgages. The problem? Nobody knew if Czechs were interested in making such an important purchase online.
Česká spořitelna wanted to make mortgages simple by offering a new product with a guaranteed annual rate of 2.38%. The bank decided to use Facebook to reach a precise audience at scale to acquire new customers and gain a bigger share of the market.
“The key for the success of the promotion was using Facebook API technologies and encouraging people to share our application. We created thousands of very segmented ads and promoted people’s stories. We basically used all the available data and technologies that Facebook offers.”
Česká spořitelna began with an ingenious idea to drive word of mouth around its new mortgages. The initial offer was an annual interest rate of 2.68% up to 100% of the property value. But as soon as 250 people signed up to that offer, the rate dropped to 2.38% — a clear incentive for people to tell their friends about the campaign.
In the meantime, the bank used its own data to create a Custom Audience of people on Facebook who already had one of its mortgages. It then segmented this by how many years were left on the mortgage and created a Lookalike Audience to find people on Facebook who shared similar characteristics. These people were then reached with ads encouraging them to sign up. Finally, the bank set up a website Custom Audience of people who had visited the mortgage section of the Česká spořitelna website but hadn’t converted. These potential customers were also reached with ads.
After setting up these Custom Audiences, the bank signed up to Business Factory to control all of these promotions through its Ads API technology. Using the platform ROI Hunter we managed the audiences, promoted stories and, most importantly, AB-tested the bank’s ads to ensure that only the most effective were continually shown to customers.
We used Google Analytics in ROI Hunter to test and optimize all areas of the campaign, and the results reflected this attention to detail.
Within 2 weeks in June 2014, Česká spořitelna collected 1,776 applications, 1,639 of which qualified as confirmed leads. Moreover, these leads were achieved incredibly efficiently, quadrupling the number of customers on the bank’s books and driving an astonishing $63.5 million in revenue.