ACE CASH EXPRESS:
Andrea was instrumental in the consolidation and enhancement of operations across a previously fragmented marketing function in the organization. The advent of online lending and card services products had entailed the installation of an entirely separate ECommerce department as the viability of the online business was being assessed. During this evaluation period, digital marketing persisted as the only performance marketing function in the organization, held accountable to its own budgets and forecasts of new customer acquisitions and specific breakeven horizons on digital advertising expenditures. The other separately governed marketing function in the organization focused on radio and billboard out-of-home advertising, in addition to providing print collateral and signage for brick-and-mortar locations.
Andrea immediately assumed leadership of multiple teams and agencies responsible for digital campaign management, SEO, web content management and optimization, testing and analytics, and then eventually absorbed the complete responsibility of CRM, including transactional messaging on lending products. She challenged the status quo, encouraging her team leaders to conduct analyses to identify pockets of inefficiency where funds or efforts could be reallocated toward marketing efforts with greater opportunity to continue converting customers at higher rates.
Andrea injected energy into the web optimization function by introducing reporting on the cumulative testing program performance and its A/B test throughput. The reports revealed the opportunity to ramp up testing efforts by addressing additional segments of web traffic and decrease the gaps between tests.
When Andrea was handed responsibility for CRM after its team dissolved under its former leadership, it required that she quickly identify a new senior manager and supporting team members. With the onboarding of new CRM talent with the right experience and expertise, Andrea empowered them to explore new tools and processes to streamline their efforts, especially with respect to the robust email program that was still fraught with cumbersome production issues and data management challenges. She and her CRM team jointly explored and implemented templatization and quality assurance solutions that cut email production and deployment cycles by 80% and yielded double-digit annual growth in email-attributed revenue.
Given her team’s high accountability to attain financial objectives, Andrea collaborated with the Finance and Risk teams to routinely evaluate the longer-term profitability of various customer segments to assess how she could throttle her teams’ efforts toward attracting higher performing customers. With finite methods of targeting across the various marketing channels and platforms available to her teams, Andrea had to work closely with team leaders to calibrate their tactics accordingly. Her teams’ combined efforts led to three consecutive years of EBITDA growth for online products.
After online products quickly proved their economic viability, the marketing functions merged under a single umbrella in which Andrea continued to lead all digital marketing. As digital efforts continued to scale, Andrea spearheaded the creation of processes that established formalized in-house creative production that had previously existed in an underutilized state, thereby improving throughput of assets to leverage in ongoing A/B testing efforts across all digital touchpoints. While helping improve the creative production process, Andrea recognized a chronic inconsistency in the way in which the ACE brand presented itself throughout its creative assets. She initiated efforts to develop coherent brand presentation throughout its entire digital footprint.
In addition, Andrea took the initiative to create the business case for and ultimately launch the company’s first digital brand awareness campaigns, implementing experimental design best practices to measure incremental lift to KPIs and prove the ROI of these efforts.
Andrea recognized the need for vast improvements to customer data management in order for her team to continue scaling its efforts and impact. Therefore, she pushed aggressively for investment in massive enhancements to CRM capabilities that historically had been hamstrung by complex IT dependencies. She created an interdepartmental task force and hired a consulting firm to audit the existing customer data management practices and touchpoints throughout the customer journey, technical challenges notwithstanding. This exercise generated a roadmap with the end goal of migration to a best-in-class CRM platform to serve as a single source of truth about our customers and offer native segmentation and workflow capabilities, offering progressive stages of maturity along the path to full implementation and adoption.
Andrea held operation roles for these brands:
One Technologies, Ace Cash Express
