Community - Case Study

Intuit Uses SimpleFeed to build Community

  Business Challenge
With products that include Quicken, QuickBooks and TurboTax, Intuit is the worldwide leader in financial software for small businesses, accounting professionals and consumers. As financial software is a highly referential sale, the QuickBooks division of Intuit was eager to connect and build community with its customer base. With only 15% of the estimated 20 million U.S. small businesses using accounting software, Intuit sensed a major business opportunity if it could turn its QuickBooks' customer base into highly engaged community members. However, the QuickBooks customer base is a less technical and email-fatigued community. Members seemed to be shifting their attention from email and to RSS Feeds even though the existing feeds were hard to find and difficult to use. But without RSS analytics it was impossible to determine if this was a good thing. Did these customers buy more? And did these customers know the content came from Intuit without any branding in the feed.

  Solution
With minimal IT resources, Intuit deployed SimpleFeed to consolidate existing RSS Feeds of message board, blog and podcast content and provide a simple subscription process (image 1).

Image 1 - Intuit's QuickBooks RSS Preference Center

Feed content is templated to reflect the QuickBooks Brand (image 2) and published through unique URLs to allow precise measurement.

Image 2 - Intuit's QuickBooks Group RSS Feed in Yahoo Mail RSS Reader

  Results
Nearly 20% of inbound web traffic is attributable to QuickBooks Group's RSS program. Customers have responded to Intuit's community efforts. Intuit now enjoys lower support costs and more enthusiastic customers. Intuit has since rolled out SimpleFeed to five additional properties.

"One fifth of our traffic is users bypassing the front page and getting there directly via RSS feeds."
        Scott Wilder, on Intuit's use of SimpleFeed