Energy Australia

When I joined Energy Australia 5 plus years ago, we were doing digital marketing like most other organizations in the energy sector i.e. A cookie cutter approach showingonly our best available offer to all prospecting customers than landing them on a page that details the same offer & hope they convert. The missing piece of the puzzle was customer intent, for example - Where they looking to move energy when they move home or simple looking to change their energy provider for a better deal. Where the needs of existing customers different from new customers?

From earlier cookie cutter approach, we have now moved to INTENT based marketing using customersignals to identify intent. This was achieved byseamlessly connecting our MarTech& AdTech stacks to generate a 360 customer view, creating rule based audience segments & activating them in real time through our paid & 101 channels. This has led to almost 6x improvement in customer engagement rates & 11x improvement in sales conversion.

Using 4 step agile framework below, your business canalso deliver successful Marketing Automation Use Case Implementations:

1. Identify top customer facing business challenges & prioritize

No matter what business you run, MarTech automation can help take away the stress of manually managing customer expectations & communication - Be it customer acquisition, welcome pack, upselling newer products, running loyalty program or winning back a lost customer.

Identify all your customer facing business challenges (you can use above list as a starting point) & than assign high to low value to each business challenge using Desirability (how badly customers want it), Feasibility (how easy it will be to solve this challenge?) &Viability (What will it cost?) framework. Prioritize challenges using high to low DVF scores.

2. Map challenges to business/ customer insights, identify solutions and agree on“what does success look like”

Once you have identified high value customer facing challenges for your business, pick top 3 & map customer or business insights to them, define a very top level solution, create a simple user story for stakeholder understanding & agree with your stakeholders on “What does success look like” upon final implementation. An example for your reference below:

Challenge – We lose more customers than we acquire sowe want to retain existing customers

Insight: Customers who engage with our content tend to stay longer.

Solution: Identify & create personalized content program for large customer cohorts delivered through email & app

"MarTech automation can help take away the stress of manually managing customer expectations & communication"

User Story: As a customer, I would love to be a loyal customer to business XYZ as they provide me timely & relevant content for my personal needs.

Success KPI: Growth in Nett Customer base

3. Collaborate with MarTech experts to scope out solution

This step is one of the most important one as you really get into the details of solution scoping by answering What do we want to offer customers, when & how do we offer it to customers. This can be achieved by answering questions like:

• What does the solution look like?

• What data sources will be needed?

• How will we create content/ communication/ offers?

• Which channels will be used for customer activation?

• How will we connect all the data sources & activation channels together, so the solution is automated & works in real-time

My favourite way to do this is gather all relevant SMEs in a single room & run a Post-It brainstorming session on what each one of us thinks could be a possible solution & than shortlist few ideas that work. SMEs than go back to scope out these ideas further & respond back with final workable solutions.

4. Track progress on all activities, solve for roadblocks& deliver Use Cases:

Once the solution is nailed down, I suggest having a KanBan wall where all stakeholders generate tickets for their actions on the project,meet biweekly to discuss roadblocks &necessary support from each other to keep progressing. Scrum Master can rotate between different team members. Test the MVP/ UseCase with actuals users where possible & release in market with a feedback loop so you can identify issues & course correct as you go.

5. Measure success, optimize MVP & than refine backlog to take up challenges next in priority:

Once use cases have been delivered, it’s time to measure success (this was earlier agreed upon with stakeholders) & prove value to business. Use user feedback loop to make course correct & make changes to ensure most value is derived from the Use Case.

It s now time to refine your challenges backlog & may be rerun DVF to see if the priority list still holds same business value.Than take these backlog use cases again through 5 step agile framework for delivery.

Work of caution: Implementedusecases can sometime feel like stepchild, but its important to remember that they need attention to continue delivering business value so monitor the KPIs on an ongoing basis & run optimizations to see how the results can be improved further

This 5 step process should help you identify your most valuable business challenges, easiest implementable path, actual implementation& monitoring of value realized.

This framework has helped deliver success at EnergyAustralia so I hope you will find this methodology useful in creating intent based Personalized Marketing Automation for your business.