INTERVIEW: Sanlam seeks “segment of one” marketing model with first party data push

Alex Sword

Editor

The Financial Services Forum

Sanlam is looking to move towards a “segment of one” marketing model in the near future its CMO says.

Sanlam is the largest non-banking financial services organisation on the African continent, selling services mainly through intermediaries such as investment, insurance and credit.

The firm has been on a digital transformation journey for four years, Mariska Oosthuizen explains. This comprises four main areas of focus: building digital skills, improving measurement, persona-based marketing and automation.

It has created an academy inside the firm to build digital skills while focussing on hiring and bringing a number of new tech, product leads and data scientists into the company.

In 2023 it launched an internal fintech cluster, which aims to drive the firm’s adoption of a digitally-led direct-to-consumer business model. This unit is currently looking at how to move data into the cloud as well as at the firm’s martech stack. The Group Brand and Marketing department used to sit within the Group Office, but has now been moved into this cluster.

These innovations are aimed at solving two key challenge faced by marketing at the moment: finding growth for the business and proving the value of marketing.

Mariska cites the old adage of John Wanamaker that “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” and says she is on a mission to change this.

She adds: “So often [marketers] struggle to get our CEOs and CFOs to understand what we want to achieve and take us seriously.”

“Gaining this respect means proving value and therefore measuring everything.”

Taking cues from Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Sanlam wants to be more scientific in how it approaches marketing and make sure it drives growth in the most efficient and effective way, she says.

A major priority has been to move to a single view of customers.

“The ultimate vision is it is all connected and works in a seamless way, led by the client and what they want rather than by trying to sell them products.”

Eventually Sanlam aims to be able to understand each individual and predict what they will need next. A customer might take a certain action, which can be connected with data garnered from social listening. The firm will then be able to deliver the right kind of personal, data-driven message to this “segment of one”.

As Mariska notes, this vision is much more driven by comparisons with fintechs like Revolut and Lemonade, as well as tech giants such as Spotify, Google and Amazon, than it is by comparisons with Sanlam’s traditional peers.

“There are some of our current competitors that I think do it better than us. But is anybody doing it really well? No, I don’t think so.”

Getting to this single view was complicated by the fact that data was siloed across the different divisions within the business, with conversion data belonging to intermediaries. There was very little visibility of a client across all of the different touchpoints, meaning there was no shortage of data in the organisation, but there was very little insight being generated from it.

Like all marketers, the team faced growing challenges in tracking conversions due to evolving privacy regulations and reduced access to third party cookies.

Last year saw the company make a major “step change” in the firm’s data practices, working to consolidate all of its media data into one cloud platform. This allowed the firm for the first time to see the impact of specific marketing channels and campaign performance on website activity in terms of cost per lead, click through rate.

This approach was used to measure the marketing of the launch of a new person based marketing campaign. This saw the firm able to see clear lead performance for different channels, creatives and audiences.

This consolidation of data led to a great improvement in results between 2022 and 2023, with the click through rate in 2022 of around 0.93% rising to around 2.6% in 2023. When Sanlam started measuring based on cost per lead, it was able to bring this down from around 3000 Rand (£131) to around 100 Rand (£4).

Through Incubeta’s partnership with Google, Sanlam implemented Google’s Enhanced Conversions and Performance Max products. With Enhanced Conversions, first-party customer data is collected and used to match customers to the Google accounts they were signed into when they engaged with the ad.

The results were a 191% increase in total lead form conversions, a 343% increase in Performance Max conversions and surpassing the yearly target of 20,000 email sign-ups by tripling that number. Sanlam now plans to extend the use of Enhanced Conversions across all marketing campaigns.

Mariska notes that the project is an important proof of concept for digital evolution.

“It really proved to us what we can actually do if we can get visibility of the right data connected in the right way and use the right technology to drive success.”

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