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GoCompare and MoneySuperMarket have both shifted away from loud, price-driven messaging to focus on personalised customer experiences based on data, in the hope of differentiating themselves and increasing loyalty.

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29 July 2019

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Why technology is central to comparison sites’ new strategies

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The job of a price comparison site sounds simple. But despite building their brands and their businesses on the back of one core function – helping consumers find the lowest prices available – some have begun attempting to move away from this one-dimensional positioning. Both GoCompare and MoneySuperMarket have made big strategic shifts recently to differentiate their brands from the rest of the market. MoneySuperMarket made the bold choice to abandon the ‘epic’ money-saving messaging of its TV ads and move in the polar opposite direction, promising to remove the anxiety from customers’ finances and help them ‘Get money calm’. Meanwhile GoCompare has been focusing on a new mission it calls ‘savings as a service’, trying to boost retention and give customers a reason not to look elsewhere. While the two brands are going different ways, both are putting customer data and technology at the centre of their new strategies, overhauling their customer communications, as each of them revealed during the Salesforce World Tour conference in London. Both are responding to customer expectations that Salesforce has identified in its ‘State of the Connected Customer’ report, which found 70% of consumers say connected processes are important for winning their business and the same number say this about a brand’s understanding of how they use its products and services. Clara Toombs, head of CRM strategy at MoneySuperMarket, said: “We have gone from being quite loud and ‘out there’ and transitioned to a much greater feeling of relieving financial anxiety and delivering on ‘Get money calm’. For us this is much more than a TV ad campaign.” Indeed, it has been a long journey away from a “batch-and-blast email approach” that was typical of the price comparison sector until a few years ago. The aim has been to transform this model into fully personalised, end-to-end customer experiences. Examples include monitoring customers’ energy bills to find better deals, sending automated reminders of tax and MOT deadlines, and free credit checks with advice on how to improve a credit score.

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SOURCE: SALESFORCE, 'STATE OF MARKETING 2019'

By: Morag Cuddeford-Jones

“If you give people what they want, when they want it, they are going to be engaged with your brand a lot more.”

Carl Chessum, GoCo Group

Source: SALESFORCE

Read the report here

According to Toombs, the new brand positioning stems from a technology-led transformation that started in 2015. Before that, MoneySuperMarket had three main challenges: “Low sophistication of our CRM, meaning we were sending high-volume, single transactional emails prioritising revenue over relevance. Secondly we were email-only focused, meaning we weren’t using the multiple channels we could have to engage customers. And limited in-house capabilities: we just didn’t have the skills in-house to help us achieve our ambitions of greater personalisation.” The story at GoCompare, as relayed by Carl Chessum, group CRM director of the brand’s owner GoCo Group, was a similar one. An ever more competitive marketplace was driving the need to change. “We wanted to put the customer at the heart of our success and make sure that we can offer savings as a service, which we believe every customer should be a part of and be able to enjoy.” The “mantra is helping people to find the right products, saving them time and saving them money”, and that has manifested in the launch of a new brand, Weflip, which automatically switches customers to new energy deals when a cheaper one becomes available. GoCo also acquired MyVoucherCodes and Energylinx; and has invested in Salesforce Marketing Cloud technology, as has MoneySuperMarket. As part of their respective strategy changes, both companies have adapted the ways they contact customers and use data to manage those relationships. According to Chessum, there have been numerous tangible benefits for GoCompare.

2017

2018

2019

Median number of data sources used by financial services marketing organisations

Read the report here

use of ai among financial service marketers

Currently use AI

49%

Plan to use AI within the next two years

+141%

Projected growth rate of AI use over the next two years

35%

Source: SALESFORCE

He argues: “It enables you to really focus on and develop these muscles. We can have a whole team that’s devoted to predictive analytics, and improving that and getting better at it, and then understanding how it can be used more broadly in the business.” Another key priority is to ensure data projects have valuable outcomes beyond just insights, he says: “Rather than doing analytics for the sake of analytics and maybe having a nice PowerPoint at the end of it, the whole idea is when you’re doing your project, is there an asset you can leave behind that can be repurposed or reused?” For example, Barclays has used its analytics capabilities to create segmentations based on where customers’ spending behaviour clusters around particular brands. This has created new insights on brand behaviour that Barclays can offer to corporate clients. Hardy explains: “We looked at our customers’ transactional behaviour and we looked at the brands that they spend on, and then we looked at the interaction between those brands – so if someone spends at brand X they are also likely to spend at brand Y. Then we performed some clustering around those brands and found which travelled together, and are better explained together than apart.”

Barclays also used anonymised card transaction data to find ways to serve its most valuable customers better in branches. The analysis showed affluent customers were more likely to be in the area around a branch later in the day, which led to the bank extending opening hours to allow them to come into the premises. A third application of analytics was to examine the catchment areas for particular stores using similar transaction data, for the benefit of clients in the retail and restaurant sectors. This has enabled those clients to work out how far consumers are willing to travel to visit a store, so they can see which existing stores have overlapping catchments and where they might be able to access a new market by opening a new store. This type of innovation around data has not been common for big, established financial services companies. Indeed, for many, the need to protect legacy business models has actively held it back. But as Aviva’s UK retail and brand director Tom Daniell told Marketing Week recently, “if customers believe we are innovating on their behalf, that’s a real driver of trust”.

The brand’s new AvivaPlus subscription product has been designed to reward loyal customers with the best price, rather than giving new customers the best deals and implicitly penalising those already with the brand. It has required a new product development model and was only possible because the company switched towards more agile working, where teams responsible for communications, data, media, proposition, product, customer experience, pricing and risk all sit together. According to Daniell: “This isn’t about putting a veneer over an existing product. This is grassroots up, absolutely a new product that fundamentally behaves economically for us in a different way but also behaves in a different way for customers.” It also means there is consistency in the customer journey, from marketing messages through to purchase and call centre service. Customer satisfaction and net promoter scores are already higher than for Aviva’s standard insurance product, following a soft launch. This is the kind of service consumers now expect – even from monolithic financial services organisations. The whole sector now needs to move just as fast as new digital entrants in order to keep up. ■

Read the report here

With better customer journey data, the company can now “start crossing the siloes, making sure our customers in a marketing environment are happy in a customer service environment”. For the first time, it has been able to create ‘abandoned basket’ communications for anonymous people as well as customers; deliver better recommendations; and offer personalised, automated customer experiences. “Being able to act on those touchpoints, and then deliver real-time personalised messages and help push people through funnels has been quite a transformation,” he added. MoneySuperMarket’s new capabilities are similarly influential, in Toombs’ view. “Firstly we've made much better use of our rich data, enabling us to speak to customers in a more relevant way. Secondly, we've fully understood our [customers’] end-to-end experience, enabling us to really drive greater engagement. We then diversified our channel mix beyond email.” The company is now beating financial targets and achieving greater engagement as a result. The vast majority, 95%, of campaigns are now personalised and there has been an 8% increase in CRM revenue. Likewise, GoCompare’s new approach means it can market to people at a single-customer level in a fully automated environment. That leads to better, more granular segmentation and, as Chessum summarised, “if you give people what they want, when they want it, they are going to be engaged with your brand a lot more”. ■

MoneySuperMarket's new 'Get money calm' positioning has been enabled by a more personalised customer relationship

Read the report here