Heritage Bank chooses SAS® to boost marketing campaigns

Transitions from 14 mass marketing campaigns a year to 40 highly targeted campaigns a week

Heritage Bank has collaborated with analytics leader SAS in its drive to better understand its customers and ramp up its marketing capabilities. Heritage is Australia’s largest customer-owned bank and traces its origins in Queensland’s regional centers back to the 1870s.

While Heritage makes a top priority of helping its customers enjoy financial well-being through their different life stages, Jane Calder, the bank’s General Manager of Product and Marketing, said outdated direct marketing processes had become increasingly inadequate for maintaining effective customer engagement.

“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.”

She described the problem as acute. “By the time the lists and creatives were made ready, a typical campaign could take up to four or five weeks to get under way. 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. As Calder explained, “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.”

SAS also helped with a series of test campaigns for transaction account onboarding, product up-selling, 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 says. “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.”

Calder was supported by SAS consultants throughout the process and says, “Their consultants were exceptional, especially in how they explained the process to different members of the team, regardless of whether they had a data or marketing bent.”

About Heritage Bank

As Australia’s largest customer-owned bank, Heritage has been in the business of putting people first since 1875. Its ‘People First’ difference means it has no shareholders to pay and can thereby return a large share of its profits to its customers and communities. Heritage does this with better rates and farer fees, and grants and support for local community activities.