Conrad Bennett, at WebTrends, looks at how analysing internet movements and keywords can boost a company's marketing returns and bring in new business. He outlines how the NS&I used the technology to promote products other than the premium bonds, its market leader.
As the financial services industry continues to be rocked by failure and accusations of complacency and arrogance, it still needs to evolve its business technology systems to keep and attract customers. Maximising existing resources, like the internet, are critical for any business. Now when banks need customers’ cash even more, it is vital to be able to provide customers with the increasingly wanted self-service options and a capability to compare mortgage rates, investment options and insurance coverage. Eroding margins and fewer sources of new revenue also mean financial institutions must optimise marketing spend to grow revenue and increase profits.
A need to leverage online facilities
In order to remain competitive, organisations need to get the most out of their web presence and develop profitable one-to-one relationships with their customers.
For example, web analytics are increasingly being applied in the finance sector to better understand the behaviour of consumers within websites and measure a visitor’s journey and habits through a site. This intelligence can be used in a number of ways including measuring the return on investment of online customer service sites to growing online bank accounts, increasing cross-selling and improving the effectiveness of company portals.
Effective analytics also help integrate all your offline marketing activities with your online programmes providing a good overview. NS&I (National Savings and Investments) recently began applying web analytics to help them better understand their customers and maximise the return of its marketing campaigns.
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NS&I is a well-established and trusted brand that most people predominantly associate with premium bonds although over the years it has expanded its range of saving and investment products to suit the ever-changing market and consumer needs. Although premium bonds continue to be its flagship product, NS&I needed to promote the availability of its other offerings but herein lay the challenge.
Aside from premium bonds, the majority of NS&I’s other products share names with its competitors. “The principal objective was to raise awareness of our full product offering without detracting from customer interest in premium bonds,” said Mark Joslin, internet channel manager at NS&I.
Interacting with the website
In order to drive traffic to the relevant product pages, whilst maintaining the all-important premium bond sales, Joslin needed to understand exactly how users were interacting with the website and monitor the customer journey, right through from the search engine to product purchase.
NS&I had an existing system which had been an add-on to a general purpose business intelligence package and offered little more than the most basic analysis. It also worked from server logs which, because of NS&I’s infrastructure configuration, provided inadequate data from which to obtain meaningful analysis. It also took more than a day to ship a single day’s worth of server logs from the infrastructure to the analysis workstation, so each analysis run could only be done on request to the business intelligence team.
“The old method was not exactly dynamic!” said Joslin. “We knew there was a better solution out there to meet our needs. We also wanted a managed, hosted service as this fits NS&I’s outsourced business model.”
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NS&I embarked on a procurement exercise evaluating several potential web analytic candidates. Marketing Lab from WebTrends came out on top with the best balance of initial and ongoing costs, ease of implementation and use and depth of analysis. NS&I deployed WebTrends Marketing Lab as part of a website re-launch and immediately the detailed reporting provided insight into how customers were reaching the website (and therefore how accessible the site was) and allowed Joslin to identify what their key search terms were.
“At a basic level, once we found out what the key search terms were, we were able to ensure these were incorporated into site content so that customers could find exactly what they were looking for quickly and easily,” said Joslin. From the outset, NS&I worked with WebTrends to set up templates to outline particular user journeys. Each of its products has an 'invest now' page assigned to it, marking the beginning of any one user path and from there the WebTrends solution allowed it to be tracked from start page through to committing to a purchase.
“We discovered that there are typically 15 stages to the purchasing process and as we followed each step we were able to monitor customer ‘drop-off’ and pinpoint the problem pages that required optimisation,” said Joslin. “This allowed us to redesign accordingly in order to streamline the customer experience and offer appropriate assistance.” Furthermore, with NS&I recently launching research that revealed that less than one in 10 people understand financial terminology, it was fundamental that the whole buying process ran smoothly and simply – with drop-off points identified within that process.
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“Previous to implementing Marketing Lab we had limited visibility of who was using the website, how they were using it and when,” said Joslin. “Through regularly studying the WebTrends reports we quickly found that monitoring customer behaviour was a lot more complicated than we initially anticipated.
The journey a new customer takes differs entirely from that of an existing customer’s, in that they enter the site at different stages, which meant we had to look at optimising a variety of pages, not just the homepage or 'stage one' page.”
Results
By tracking every step of the user journey through their website, NS&I has access to invaluable data on what proportion of users are return customers, what they invested in and how much. NP&I can now confidently report back to the board of directors on the success of each product both in terms of take-up and investment value.
“Web analytics software is crucial in identifying changes in user behaviour following web design alterations,” said Joslin. “Unlike any other retail site, most people using financial websites know exactly what they are interested in and it’s therefore more important to make their experience on the site interesting and engage with people individually to improve the conversion rate."
During the current period of instability in the financial markets it has become absolutely crucial for NS&I to maintain SEO in order to provide as much of its offering online as possible rather than via traditional channels. “Once the market has stabilised however, the online reports are going to be key to our offline marketing strategy as they help to pinpoint the best time to send out newsletters and e-shots, etc.” said Mark Joslin. “For example, we already know that site activity generally peaks on a Monday, falls through to Friday and is minimal at the weekend. We can also see that as premium bonds is our main product, activity levels are skewed depending on what day the prize winners are published, as we have an influx of people logging on to find out if they have won.” The use of web analytics software has already helped NS&I take a giant step forward in understanding its customers and has plans to re-develop the website further and eventually, maximise the return of all of its marketing campaigns.
Web analytics can also have a marked effect on the wording of adverts as when finance companies test new wording, the variation in the response rate can be surprisingly high. For example 'apply now' has a low response rate, as it gives the impression that you are taking the first of many steps in a long application process, so users are less inclined to click through when compared to 'get it now'.
These are simple strategies but ones that can have far-reaching effect on the way that entire websites are developed. In today’s competitive market, banks and finance companies in the UK will need to use increasingly sophisticated tactics to help them grow and retain their customer base. Web analytics is an up-and-coming and very valuable tool in the marketing arsenal to make the most of every interaction that a customer has with your website. If implemented strategically, web analytics can also have a dramatic impact on your bottom line.
Conrad Bennett is a senior technical services director at WebTrends, a provider of web analytics and consumer-centric marketing intelligence solutions.