Protyre and Purple Agency

Due to significant investment in equipment and testing facilities, it was critical that MOT bay utilisation was maximised, and that every MOT bay was earning its keep. This meant building a “demand” driven pricing model and marketing process responsive to each centre’s local market and actual bookings. Apteco's marketing automation capability was utilised, to vary the customer offer based on the number of bookings and utilisation at each individual MOT test centre “in flight” during an MOT campaign. By doing this Protyre could drive increased bookings at centres with below optimal MOT bay utilisation with higher incentives and increased marketing focus, and reduce the promotional discount at centres with high booking levels, thereby protecting and optimising MOT revenue yield.

The core MOT customer marketing journey had evolved into a multi-channel, multi-phase programme that extended over 6 weeks prior to the MOT due date. Every month, vehicle records on the Protyre database were screened against the DVLA database, to append the latest MOT due date, keeper change dates and indicators for scrappage and export. This ensured that vehicle data was kept as up to date as possible, a prerequisite for truly optimised response and conversion rates. At every campaign stage, the customer data, is matched to the latest bookings and screened against latest suppressions and opt outs. Again, all in the interests of GDPR compliance. The campaign was split into three streams: Reminders - those who had an MOT the previous year, Lapsed- reactivation of those who missed their last MOT with Protyre, and MOT Due for those who have never had an MOT with Protyre. Every vehicle owner, linked to a vehicle on the database, with an MOT due within 6 weeks, was scored with a PWE model using variables such as their vehicle type, age, make and model, and demographics such as distance to their nearest Protyre MOT test centre, to determine their propensity to buy their next MOT from Protyre and this in turn defined the selection priority and optimal customer communications mix for communications they would receive. The PWE model score was not only used to automate the campaign routing across mail, email and outbound calling, but also the selection hierarchy and marketing effort invested in each customer. The core marketing programme prioritised high propensity customers and enabled the automatic selection of additional candidates for centres, where bookings were below their MOT booking target, to increase local MOT marketing activity in their area. The project created a closed loop marketing model using FastStats and PeopleStage to automatically adapt MOT promotional offers and mailing volumes “in flight” for each MOT Test centre, during the 6 week MOT campaign cycle. Automatically applying a higher promotional discount at centres with lower levels of MOT bookings and reducing incentives at centres with already high booking levels, protecting and optimising the MOT revenue yield. Designing the original campaign flow was challenging and required the integration of a number of elements and functions into the PeopleStage campaign schema. These included new weekly data feeds for bookings (on and off line), combining “live data” with campaign level persistent variables to route audience journeys, using “Splitting” within PeopleStage rather than manual interventions to drop and re-route records and a complete ruleset to define most appropriate MOT test centre for each customer, de-conflicting nearest, last used, most frequently used and customer movers new addresses.

Successful deployment delivered an immediate dividend - a saving of 4 day’s effort every month, and a robust process without the risks of manual data errors. Once proven, this allowed Protyre to start work on building the logic to support demand based pricing and centre booking utilisation optimisation, something that could not have been contemplated using manual processes.