Coastal Capital Savings Website

By Joyce Moed, Reporter

SURREY, B.C.–Coast Capital Savings website has a star attraction. And her name is Julie.
While she is not live, Julie is a real person, played by actress and stand-up comedian Jackie Blackmore, who offers site visitors a sampling of comedy along with credit union information.
Julie, the online greeter, is programmed to run a movie file corresponding to questions asked by visitors to the site. Visitors can click on key product questions or type their questions in a dialogue box. Julie provides responses to hundreds of questions about products, services and Coast Capital Savings. Common search terms to which Julie responds include: insurance, savings, loan RRSP and media.

Julie keeps herself busy between questions by cleaning, knitting or painting her nails. She also responds to action words, such as “dance,” and responds humorously to curse words.
The revised website, which includes Julie, was launched about one year ago as a way to enhance users online experience with the credit union.

“Statistically, it’s been great,” said Wendy Lachance, manager of e-business development for Coast Capital Savings. “Page views have gone up 29%. Visits have gone up 76%.”

In addition, users spend 25% more time on the site, Lachance said, marking these site-visiting numbers four times the industry average. Also, of the site visitors, 10% are interacting with Julie.

Lachance said that while it is difficult to track if the new site has attracted new members to the credit union, “our membership growth has been going up significantly month to month. The analytical aspect is always very challenging, though.”

The cost for the new website, which includes the Julie component, site tools, hosting fees, production fees and more, totaled a little more than $100,000, Lachance said. Since then they’ve added new updates, including additional skits for Julie, which equaled about another $90,000. The site was originally launched in July 2006. In November 2006 another 90 skits were added, after they got more of a sense at what attracted people. At present there are about 200 skits–70% are product-related. There are also about 2,00 key words. “We haven’t done an update since and probably wont do one until this fall, so we’re guessing we’ll do updates annually.
“We actually pay to host Julie separately so it is at a faster speed,” Lachance said.

But one place Coast Capital Savings did not have to spend much was in marketing the new site.
“The only actual marketing of the site we did was through our newsletter and website,” Lachance said. “We also encouraged our 2,000 employees, and asked then to send the email about the site to three friends.”

Coast Capital also got unplanned free advertising about the site.

“The local paper had a story about the site on page two of the business section the day we launched. And one of the local radio stations had a listener that called in talking about Julie. The DJs played around with it and came back later and talked about it,” Lachance said.

“One of our goals was to make to make our site innovative and newsworthy. We kind of felt like we were trailblazing. We believe we were the first Canadian website with an online greeter.”
In addition to Julie, the new site also includes easier navigation, online banking and information pages.

Finding the right actress to play Julie “was really easy,” Lachance said. About 18 months ago, Coast Capital Savings did a viral e-mail campaign to try to attract younger members to the credit union. Blackmore was the actress casted for the viral e-mail.

“She was so good and easy to work with,” Lachance said. “She is clever and witty, and the perfect age–not too old, not too young. We have her on an exclusivity contract that we renew yearly.”
Among Coast Capital Savings employees, Julie has become a celebrity, and Blackmore was invited to emcee at a recent annual awards ceremony for the credit union.

“Staff members took their pictures with her,” Lachance said.

The concept for the online greeter and the design of Coast Capital Savings’ new site are the product of Vancouver-based ad agency Rethink. Burnkit, also based in Vancouver, completed development of the online greeter, working in close partnership with Coast Capital Savings’ e-business development team.

“Previously our website was very static,” Lachance said. “You came to the home page and you saw a long laundry list of choices. It wasn’t on-brand it wasn’t very dynamic.”