NewDay hits the right note with customers with 244 automations and 150 personalised journeys.

NewDay is one of the largest providers of consumer finance in the UK, issuing one in five new credit cards. The company serves almost five million customers, offering responsible credit from its well-known consumer brands such as Aqua, Bip, and Marbles, and through co-branded cards, digital credit, and loyalty solutions with iconic British retailers. Despite the challenging economic landscape, NewDay is growing fast and is underpinned by a clear purpose – to help people move forward with credit. Responsible lending is at the heart of everything the company does.

The communication needs of a multi-brand business are complex, but NewDay’s communication approach has evolved thanks to the capability of the Salesforce platform. NewDay swapped disparate systems – both costly and complex – for a single source of truth. It connected the dots until every customer came into focus, launched a centre of excellence, and united teams with a mission to communicate with clarity.

Salesforce is at the heart of a wider transformation at NewDay to streamline more than 244 automations and 150 journeys throughout the customer lifecycle, and to minimise the chances of communication outages. It empowers a growing Digital Communications team – which is responsible for enterprise-wide communications – to send more than 100 million tailored messages a year and support future growth year-on-year.

“With Marketing Cloud, we can send hyper-personalised, dynamic communications to give customers the information they need to navigate each stage of their credit journey effectively. The more tailored our communications, the greater the opportunity for our customers to receive the support they need, when they need it. In the financial services sector, this is more important now than ever,” said Elizabeth Skinner, Marketing Director at NewDay.

Let’s take a closer look at how NewDay built a best-in-class marketing experience to unlock the benefits of personalisation, richer content, and customised journeys for customers and partners alike.

NewDay has big ambitions. In 2016, it began centralising multiple communications on Marketing Cloud – and it hasn’t looked back since. The volume of communication being sent from Marketing Cloud continues to grow and today, it amounts to the majority of customer contacts from acquisition to payments and service notifications. NewDay is now able to standardise processes and operate more efficiently at scale.

Using APIs, NewDay integrated the majority of its communication touchpoints across preferences, servicing, support, and marketing with Salesforce resulting in one platform supporting both its consumer and merchant businesses. 

“The biggest win was rolling out Signature Success in 2022, which monitors the 244 automations and 150 journeys and component parts running on the platform and proactively flags potential issues before they cause disruption,” explained Suzanne Knowles, Head of Digital Communication at NewDay.

Whether they’re existing customers or shoppers using a new retail credit card, NewDay is building stronger connections with its five million customers with timely, relevant communications. As a leader in the marketing space as well as a financial services innovator, it also delivers communications across its merchant portfolio for some of the UK’s most well-known brands. In many cases, starting at the very beginning of the customer experience with the acquisition and onboarding journeys.

“We’ve built over 150 journeys across multiple brands in Marketing Cloud. From personalised journeys with dynamic content tailored for different lifecycle stages, products, and service adoption to hyper-personalised messaging that looks at how and where each individual interacts with their credit product, we tailor the content every customer receives accordingly. We send a mix of real-time, triggered, or event-based communications across SMS, email, and push,” said Knowles.

A huge amount of care has gone into designing the ideal customer experience. Customers are segmented by touchpoint, brand, or service. The team uses AMPscript, a built-in scripting language, to create those winning 1:1 moments with advanced dynamic content on multiple channels. These are then tested, and the team works with other departments such as the fraud or finance team to make sure they’re striking the right note for positive customer outcomes.

But centralised and streamlined processes don’t mean NewDay can’t be flexible. When postal strikes meant new credit cards were going to arrive late, the team quickly sent a targeted campaign to let the affected customers know – a level of transparency that’s essential for building trust with customers and helping them on their journey with credit, while navigating a challenging environment.

With great foundations now in place, NewDay could fine-tune operations and eliminate any complexity that stood in the way of efficiency. Being a digitally-led company means using the latest in platform technology to offer the best customer experiences – ensuring NewDay can deliver on its purpose to help people move forward with credit.

One way to unlock even more efficiency has been to automate time-consuming processes. As Knowles said, “We have more than 6,700 automated processes – from marketing automation to acquisition workflows, and data ingestion to analytics – everything that can be automated has been.”

At a time when doing more with less is top of mind for everyone, a mindset of continuous optimisation and efficiency frees up every member of the team to be more productive and effective. And to continue meeting the demands of its growing business, NewDay established a Centre of Excellence with a focus on recruiting specialist skills and upskilling and training its team. From here, it develops best practices to share across multiple teams.

“We’ve developed a consistent approach to the design and delivery of communications across NewDay, providing our expertise across the consumer portfolio, merchant partnerships, and platform business,” explains Knowles. “We’re always testing how we work and looking for ways to be more efficient.”

The Salesforce integration has helped the Digital Communications team to create bespoke consumer and retail experiences in a more flexible way and increased 1:1 personalisation to support differing customer needs throughout the journey. The result? NewDay has significantly increased the number of communications going out without increasing headcount.

With one combined data source and a unified platform, the next step was to adopt Marketing Cloud Intelligence and Tableau to start getting granular with that data. While there’s a dedicated team of data experts on hand to create reports around engagement rates, for example, other staff can self-serve to pull their own insights. This helps NewDay to track and monitor how effective communications and campaigns are and to share insights with retail partners.

“Tableau enriches our data and makes it even more accessible. It allows us to combine multiple data sets from different parts of the business to get a richer understanding of customer behaviour and their interactions across multiple brands,” said James Edwards, Senior Specialist, Platform Digital Communications at NewDay. 

Ultimately, optimisation all comes back to the customer and retail partner experience – Salesforce efficiencies free up NewDay to focus on creating moments that really matter.