Marketing campaign for iDEAL, the Dutch standard for safe online payments
Novocortex got an assignment from Rabobank to manage its iDEAL marketing campaign. iDEAL was the new Dutch standard for safe and direct payments on the internet. The main campaign objective was to get 150 web shops connected to iDEAL via Rabobank, by the end of 2005. In December 2005, there were more than 400 web shops that chose Rabobank as their iDEAL services provider (about 40% market share). And the campaign budget stayed below 40.000 euro incl. production and media costs, because iDEAL banners, Flash demos and iDEAL Shopping Centre were produced in New Europe.
We decided to start the campaign 6 months before the product launch to be ahead of other banks. And to position Rabobank as the leading online services provider. We wanted our target group to know that iDEAL was based on the existing payment solution of Rabobank - Rabo DirectBetalen.
Novocortex used the following marketing instruments in the iDEAL marketing campaign:
[1] We started with search engine marketing to generate traffic to the iDEAL landing page. Website visitors were encouraged to subscribe to our newsletter, if they wanted the latest iDEAL information from the first hands.
[2] We sent the latest iDEAL news to weblogs and forums to draw attention of the target audience to iDEAL. We organized congresses on e-payments to generate free publicity and get feedback on product development.
[3] These marketing actions helped us to build a database with more than 1.500 addresses of Dutch web shops. So, we were able to send iDEAL news to about 70-80% of all active Dutch web shops. Rabobank was the first in the market to announce its iDEAL fees. Other banks (iDEAL was supported by 4 major Dutch banks) could only follow.
[4] In order to differentiate Rabobank from other banks, we decided to launch additional iDEAL services, such as URLinked and iDEAL Shopping Centre. URLinked offered hyperlinks to web shops from the internet banking system of Rabobank. iDEAL Shopping Centre was aimed to generate traffic to participating web shops and convince consumers that shopping online is as safe as in the real city.
[5] We facilitated online donations with iDEAL to help victims of the Pakistan earthquake, and collected more than 695.000 euros in two weeks!
In 2007, the market share of online payments with iDEAL reached 20% and exceeded that of credit cards. And 75% of online consumers considered iDEAL to be a very safe payment method.