Who enjoys filling in forms? Well, no one. So when small business owners are filling in a loan application, they might become discouraged, or need to check information and come back later. Funding Circle built an automated email system to continue the conversation with applicants who abandon their partially filled forms and encourage them to complete. Now, Funding Circle can help more businesses get the funds they need to grow.

Funding Circle wanted to ensure that more customers were completing the loan application process on its website. A loan application form can require details that you don’t have on hand, and applicants were leaving the form at different stages throughout the process. Hugo Peurois, Senior CX & Data Insight Manager at Funding Circle, built a drop-off automation system but it was, as Hugo puts it, “Very linear, simply because it did not cater to where users dropped off. We wanted to do something more complex back then, but had to scale it down.”

Acoustic ran workshops for Funding Circle on how to use Acoustic programs and to help the team understand all the different aspects of Acoustic Campaign. At that point, Funding Circle was able to design and build its own program, with some guidance around decision points and reasoning.

Hugo Peurois said, “With Acoustic Campaign we have a lot more granularity. With this technology, we had the opportunity to do something better and bigger.” Using Campaign, he and his team were able to build a sophisticated cart abandonment program. “When a loan application is completed, the applicant receives an instant decision. But, sometimes, they start filling in a form, but then exit the website before completing the form.”

“The objective of the automation is to have them complete their form,” reports Peurois.  For those who do not, "We have a connection between our application system and Acoustic Campaign which enables us to see the different application stages in a relational table. That means we can tailor our messaging within the automation based on the user’s progress.”

The follow-up emails can be quite simple or very detailed, depending on client interests. For Funding Circle, “We have created this big automation which uses 160+ objects, 57 user redirects, 26 decision points, 25 profile updates, and 22 different email configurations.” With this depth of automation in play, the team can anticipate every stage of abandonment, the most common problems, and be prepared with suggestions to entice potential applicants to return and finish their loan applications.

“Our program had a control and test distribution split,” Peurois continues. “While the control cell was a simple hold-out group, the test cell received the full experience as we designed it in our automation canvas. Based on where the applicant dropped off on the form and their behavior in days following the start of their application, the program will deliver a different experience, adjusting the email contact frequency and messaging mix for each user.”

This sophisticated automation makes a complicated business process faster and easier to execute, making full use of programs, relational tables, and dynamic content on a huge scale — and helps to drive an uplift in conversions.

Peurois sums up the results: “We’ve seen great success from this program. Our control group didn’t receive any emails and with the test group, we had a 9% conversion uplift from when the app started until completion. This is a great achievement. It’s over what we expected, so we’re very pleased with that result. The efforts translated into a 10% conversion uplift from when the app started to when the loan offer was made. We are very happy with this result.”