Standard Life is a leading longterm savings and investment company, with around 3.8 million customers in the UK and around six million worldwide.
The Standard Life group includes savings and investments businesses, which operate across the UK, Canada, Europe, Asia and Middle East; workplace pensions and benefits businesses in the UK and Canada; Standard Life Investments, a global investment manager, which manages £179bn globally; and its Chinese and Indian Joint Venture businesses. At the end of March 2013 the Group had total assets under administration of over £233bn.
In the UK, Standard Life offers a range of individual and group pensions, SIPPs, ISAs, annuities, life assurance, offshore bonds, investment management, wealth management, tax planning and estate management services.
Standard Life’s business is insight driven, with customers at the core. And by understanding its customers and their needs, the firm helps people with their financial planning, so they can feel more confident about the future.
The challenge
The financial sector has undergone considerable changes in recent years, most notably with the implementation of the Retail Distribution Review (which has changed the way people pay for financial advice) and the introduction of automatic enrolment (which it is hoped will make it easier for millions of more people in the UK to save for their retirement through the workplace). But another significant change is ongoing too – the rise of online financial management.
One of Standard Life’s objectives was to develop its online and mobile management so that its customers could have faster, easier access at a time that best suited them. Before this could happen, Standard Life needed to gain a deeper knowledge of how its customers interacted with its websites across various territories without placing additional burden on internal resources.
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Standard Life did not have the resources and knowledge available internally to implement a comprehensive analytics solutions that would provide the data needed to make valuable decision-making information and actions. It therefore needed a provider who could not only offer an in-depth analytics solution but also have the expertise to support internal teams with implementation and make the most of the data collected.
The solution
Following a full market review, Standard Life selected Webtrends – specialists in digital marketing optimisation and relevance through real-time, unified analytics and customer intelligence – for its Analytics 10 platform and expertise, as well as Segments and Heatmaps, to access in-depth reporting and actionable insights into its customers.
Webtrends Analytics 10 is a platform deployed across all digital properties, designed to help marketers more effectively acquire, engage and retain customers. Its creators describe it as easy to use with a highly intuitive user interface that puts the power of analytics in the hands of marketers.
Using this platform, Webtrends views, tracks and measures visitor behaviour, painting a clear picture of customer’s interaction on the main website or mobile app. The data captured helps the marketing teams at Standard Life understand what customers respond to – and what they do not – via a user-friendly dashboard, enabling them to refine the journey and increase effectiveness ,while better targeting content and services online.
Gaining insight about customers is essential to personalising digital experiences. Webtrends visitor segmentation helps businesses identify and nurture prospects, drive revenue and conversions and connect analytics insight to create powerful customer segments and drive relevant actions. By targeting and testing within customer segments businesses can identify and focus on the most valuable customer segments to improve performance of marketing programs, for example. By getting the right message to the right audience at the right time can lead to great results and increased ROI.
In addition to this Webtrends has a team of experts on hand to help Standard Life make the most of its digital marketing investments and ensure rapid and successful deployment of the solutions. Its services experts work with internal teams and users to define, implement, test and provide best practices throughout the partnership.
Results
Over the course of two years, the relationship between Standard Life and Webtrends has gone from strength-to-strength as both parties have developed and improved Standard Life’s digital marketing operations. Standard Life renewed its contract with Webtrends in 2012 for a further two years following the success of its experience as a result.
Webtrends Analytics solutions were first rolled out in the UK to its 3.8 million customers, and then deployed across further territories including: Standard Life Investments, Ireland, Canada with plans to roll out its Asia & Emerging Markets business later this year.
Webtrends Analytics 10 was particularly useful during Standard Life’s entry into the mobile space where it could quickly create reports and gain insight into customer’s activities on its mobile app which, when cross referenced with its customer data, meant it could clearly understand the assets owned by customers and see a specific customer segment making strong use of mobile. Data is collected and presented in one place enabling Standard Life to quickly and easily understand its mobile app users in terms of behaviour and download rate.
Furthermore, Webtrends Segments helps Standard Life to quickly identify the characteristics and behaviours of specific groups of visitors. By exploring the larger visitor population and then narrowing it down with events and attributes to identify a segment, Standard Life is able to focus on specific user profiles, concentrate on certain campaigns and use this to direct advertising spend.
Drag-and-drop simplicity of Webtrends visitor segmentation makes it easy for Standard Life to identify almost any group of visitors and export a visitor list for use in targeted programs. Saved segments are automatically available which helps Standard Life to quickly pinpoint marketing opportunities in its visitor population and create specialised targeted actions.
Webtrends has changed the thinking internally at Standard Life – the business is now more aware of what its customers need in today’s digital world. Over the last two years Standard Life has made the most of Webtrends services team resulting in over 1000 hours of support. With an increased awareness of the importance of analytics, Standard Life decided to bring in more strategic services.
Webtrends has seen that customers – and the industry as a whole – are demanding more strategic consultancy on top of technical consultancy. The Webtrendsservices team works alongside Standard Life to put more measurement, KPIs and goals in place, strengthen its digital strategy, and help it to become a better digital business through customer segmentation and targeting.
David Scott, director of Group Platform and Customer Data Strategy at Standard Life, says: "The power that Analytics 10 can provide, the scalability and ease of use of the platform means we have the capability to answer any question an online business might ask.
"We have worked extensively with the professional services team at Webtrends and the quality of consulting that we receive has provided the business with the confidence to extend our partnership with Webtrends even further.
"Segments has enabled us to use the insight provided by analytics and explore patterns in visitor behaviour and identify visitor groups to specifically target. What impresses us most about the solutions that Webtrends offer is the openness of the platforms they run on. We have complete access to the platform which in addition to its ease of use and scalability makes it more beneficial to the teams using it."
Nick Sharp, VP and general manager EMEA, Webtren, comments: "The greatest barrier to adoption of digital analytics is a lack of investment and understanding by internal teams. It is not the tools that provide insights, but the people. The businesses that are succeeding in analytics today are those that have invested in extra resource, either through in-house teams or outsourcing to an agency.
"Our Analytics 10 platform is much more than just analytics. It’s an all-in-one solution that helps businesses understand its consumers’ behaviours. Analytics only works if the brand knows what needs to be achieved – success can’t be measured without targets. The experts we have at Webtrendscan help internal teams assess their situation and set relevant objectives that answer real business questions. We don’t just help you set up,we help design and manage a measurement strategy that can keep up with a business’s changing marketing objectives, and customers."
