Heritage Bank transitions from 14 mass marketing campaigns a year to 40 highly targeted ones a week

To enhance its marketing capabilities, Heritage Bank, Australia’s largest customer-owned bank, has enlisted the help of SAS. The bank is working with SAS to better understand its customers and improve its marketing campaigns.

Jane Calder, the bank’s general manager of product and marketing, says that outdated direct marketing processes could not provide a high level of customer engagement. She explains, “Our data was unstructured and ad hoc, and with campaign development involving a number of different teams, it took much too long to get a campaign into market. We were missing untapped opportunities, so we had to look at using data for better ways of communicating with existing and potential new customers.”

Calder continues, “By the time the lists and creatives were made ready, a typical campaign could take up to four or five weeks to get underway. Also, everything was mass communication, rather than being targeted at individual customers based on their past behaviors and precise product holdings. We had to make a lot of compromises, which wasn’t optimal.”

Heritage turned to SAS for an automated, trigger-based campaigns solution. “SAS helped to determine what processes need to change, with clearing up the roles and responsibilities of the different teams, and solution design, testing and implementation,” Calder says.

SAS also helped with a series of test campaigns for transaction account onboarding, product upselling, customer contact outcomes tracking and cross-selling with the bank’s insurance partner.

“Response to the campaigns, conversion rates and cost-effectiveness has been very pleasing,” Calder adds. “We have moved from running 14 mass campaigns a year to a stage where we are now running the equivalent of 40 highly relevant campaigns a week. And this will continue to increase as we scale up.”