Lithium CX Files: Post Office UK Achieves and Proves Social Marketing ROI with Lithium Reach

“Lithium Reach has really helped address our pain points.”
As our social media team has grown, so has the scale and complexity of our social media marketing efforts. However, with all that growth came a number of challenges as well, as you could only imagine. We found ourselves spending way too much time on administrative activities and far too little time actually being proactive and showing our creativity with social media. That equation needed to flip. It honestly wasn’t until we introduced Lithium Reach into our workflow that we realized what we’d been missing all along. Having a single, central platform for managing all of our social publishing alone really was a game changer for our team. Plus, it made it possible for us to start seeing, measuring, and proving ROI attached to our social media marketing campaigns like we’d never been able to do in the past.

“We’ve seen a number of improvements with Lithium Reach.”

Lithium Reach has made social media marketing quite simple for us. It has helped us avoid posting duplicate pieces of content, reduce go-to-market time from 45 minutes to a whopping 20 minutes, and manage all social media accounts and users under a single dashboard. For all of these reasons (and many more), we’ve been able to make our social media efforts work a lot harder for the business, not only helping us work towards and achieve our team’s marketing goals, but also helping to deliver on the UK Post Office’s overarching business goals. These improvements have also made it possible to secure continued support from the senior leadership team, further validating the powerful role that social media continues to play in reaching, engaging, and communicating with Post Office’s customers.

“Moving forward, we will see more collaboration between marketing and customer care.”

I don’t think we ever fully realized what we could do with social media until we brought Lithium Reach and Response under one roof – especially as it relates to using social media as an extension of the customer care team. What is clear for success, now and well into the future, is a much closer relationship between the marketing and customer care teams. The lines are now blurred. Marketing in the digital world is truly about building relationships. First and foremost, we want our customers to be happy and to have a positive experience with our brand at every touch point. And the only way to do that is to break down silos and focus squarely on the customer experience. It’s pretty clear to me that social media will play a massive role with this.

ABOUT DARREN JONES

Darren heads up Social Media Manager at Post Office, a commercial business with a public purpose, which has the largest retail network in Europe, with branches all sitting at the heart of local communities. They continue to be the leading mails retailer and their financial services business is amongst the fastest growing in the UK. Post Office have connected communities and customers with the products and services they need for centuries, and Darren is always busy finding ways to translate this digitally using social media. Outside of Post Office, Darren previously the led the social media activity for the premium beauty division of the fastest growing online retailer in the UK, The Hut Group.

ABOUT UK POST OFFICE

With over 370 years of service, Post Office is the UK's largest retail network and the largest financial services chain in the UK with more branches than all of the UK’s banks and building societies put together. They also have growing direct channels such as contact centers and online—meaning they’re there for more customers, in more ways.

They have connected communities and customers with the products and services they need for centuries—and that isn't going to change. But Post Office is now more than it ever was—an independent multi-channel business, with a vibrant, fast-growing financial services business, separated from Royal Mail and embarking on a new era of growth, modernization and customer excellence in serving the UK population.