TelstraSuper is using personalisation to elicit extra contributions and keep hundreds of millions of dollars of member funds under management by engaging with its customers more closely.
Head of digital Ingrid Gotz told the Sitecore Experience 2019 in Sydney earlier this month that the fund saw opportunities to engage members better than the superannuation industry has historically.
Superannuation wasn’t “a product or service that you would necessarily want to willingly participate in through every stage of your life,” Gotz said.
Moreover, there wasn’t necessarily “instant gratification” on offer for members that did engage with their funds more heavily.
Undeterred, TelstraSuper started working with Deloitte Digital to engage members by personalising the user experiences presented to them, both through digital and non-digital channels of engagement.
“We knew we wanted to do personalisation, and we knew that there was some big things that we had to get in place first to enable us to do that,” Gotz said.
“We partnered with Deloitte Digital to actually upgrade our Sitecore platform to version nine, which allowed us to use marketing automation, and send trigger-based campaigns.
“The second thing we did is we refreshed our internal segmentation model. We did have one previously, but it wasn't used holistically across the business, it was outdated, and it was seen by a lot of people as very confusing.
“The third thing we did is we connected Sitecore with our purpose-built member database, which pulled in data from many internal systems, which allowed us to feed that information and insights into Sitecore, and then equally pull it back out to our purpose-built database.”
The net effect for TelstraSuper was being able to categorise customers into various segments and personas, based on functional data such as how often they visited the website, their age, balance, and contribution type.
Now, when a member visits TelstraSuper’s website, the appearance, imagery, and priority order of content is customised.
Once logged in, they are displayed a dashboard with “one-to-one insights on that member. We have, at our fingertips, over 100 data points to provide that one-to-one personalisation for those members,” Gotz said.
Gotz noted that TelstraSuper hadn’t created a large amount of extra content to enable the personalisation. “[The change] was more the way that we directed them to the right and relevant content for them,” she said.
TelstraSuper saw all its key metrics - return visits, page visited, logins to its secure portal - increase after enabling personalisation.
“We also saw that members who engage with Telstra Super digitally are 50 percent less likely to leave Telstra Super than those who don't engage digitally,” Gotz said.
Gotz said that 80 percent of TelstraSuper members now receive a “personalised digital experience” “We've seen an increase in self-service transactions that members were doing, so if a member logs into our secure portal, the activities that increased were things like providing updated details, doing an investment switch, and consolidating from other superannuation funds,” she said.
Gotz said that TelstraSuper ran a specific personalised campaign targeting member retention.
“We identified through our data members who had been with TelstraSuper for certain periods of tenure, and we wanted to reach out to those members. so that we could continue to build that further relationship with them at times where we knew that they might actually start changing a job, where they might have other options to join other superannuation funds,” she said.
“We targeted these members and used personalised video - we actually did 12 variants of this video - to personalize it and show them their value as a member and why TelstraSuper was obviously beneficial for them.
“What this resulted in the campaign was we retained $280 million of funds under management, which is a fantastic result.”
The fund ran separate campaign targeting long-tenure members and their clout in recommending TelstraSuper to friends and family.
“With members we knew who are highly engaged with the fund or who had been with the fund for a certain amount of time, we assumed that there would be brand advocates or fund advocates, given how long that had been with TelstraSuper,” Gotz said.
“This campaign resulted in exceptional results as well for a campaign that was actually run on a small budget but rich data.
“We saw 400-plus new members join the fund, and an ROI on that particular campaign of 1400 percent.
“And again, I think when we talk about effective personalisation, I'm sure a lot of you have an abundance of data out there. It's just utilising it to the best of your ability so that you can resonate with your members and/or your customers and get the best response out of them.”
Gotz said that TelstraSuper saw more opportunity to personalise.
“By no means is this the end for us,” she said.
“There's a lot of things that we want to do and it's trial and error to … get the best results and the best outcomes for our members.”
