The Watch

T H E G R O W T H O F C O N V E R S I O N R A T E O P T I M I S A T I O N O N T H E S U P E R A N N U A T I O N I N D U S T R Y

Prepared by: Nima Yassini Chief Executive Officer, New Republique

Document disclaimer

This document has been created for the purposes of the pitch. All content herewith has been developed for this purpose in line with the brief provided and from personal research and findings by New Republique. The content of this document should not be used for any other purpose than the assessment of our submission. No item within this document should be used for any other purpose than that defined.

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, write to the publisher below.

Nima Yassini, Chief Executive OfficerNew Republique Pty LtdABN: 80 142 554 8813/63 William Street, Darlinghurst, NSW 2010

Executivesummary

‘The Watch’ is a quarterly market survey designed by New Republique to provide our target customers with a meaningful insights tool derived from our insights team. As an agency we must ensure that we are keeping up to speed with the recent trends and movements within the category. Within this study we take a holistic view of the Superannuation sector and their current adoption of Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).

CRO first came to fame when it was used in the Obama presidential campaign. The technique saw President Obama raise millions to assist within the electoral campaign. Today CRO has become common practice in many leading digital brands such as Amazon, Facebook, Expedia and many more.

Within Australia there are now 300+ organisations trying and using optimisation tools like Optimizely or Maxymiser. Why CRO? A recent study done by Gartner found that for every $100 spent on marketing, $99 is spent on driving traffic to a website and only $1 was spent on converting this traffic to customers. Ultimately the only brands benefiting from this model are the media channels like Google and Facebook.

CRO is slowly starting to enter the Superannuation category. Currently two brands have implemented optimisation tools and have started their journey on the CRO bell curve. Many other brands are doing basic, analog testing. Although this is good, they will not be able to get the benefits and speed that a technology play can provide. Our study looks to overview

• The importance of CRO • The changing face of the Superannuation category • A review of organisation within the category and their use of CRO • A review of how organisation within the category are updating and using their

sites

We how you find our research findings useful as you plan for the new financial year.

Nima Yassini Chief Executive Officer New Republique Pty Ltd

Researchmethodology

All research within this report has been based on:

• Personal experience • Keyboard research • Scrape data collected over 30 days of website reviews from a range of

superannuation websites

The goal of our research is to get a firm understanding of the categories use of conversion optimisation and content changes to engage, attract and acquire customers.

All findings are anecdotal and based on our 17 years of digital experience across the US, UK and Australian market.

The nextbig thing

Over the past decade organisations globally have heavily invested in digital marketing, specifically lead generation marketing. Organisations like Google, Facebook have shown massive revenue and profit growth due to this demand.

For the first time ever search marketing revenues dropped in Q4 (12% spend growth in Q4 ‘14 to 3% spend growth in Q4 ’15) due to brands shifting revenues from search into programmatic. With this ongoing demand to find new customers, marketers are increasing the cost per acquisition forcing marketing budgets to stretch to unlikely levels. Anecdotally, the only people getting rich in this model are the media channels like Google and Facebook who have recorded some major profit growths.

Within a recent research published by Gartner found that for every $100 dollar spent in marketing budgets, $99 was spent on acquiring new customers and only $1 on converting customers (Source: Gartner, Customer Experience Battlefield, February 2015). Today as always, brands are so focused on guiding customers to their website that they forget the key supporting investment must be made in developing a digital experience that is optimised for conversion.

The exercise in optimising a brands digital assets (website, mobile site or App) to increase customer experience and thus increase sales has come to be known as Conversion Rate Optimisation or CRO.

CRO is the practice of testing a range the page elements to identify what mix of elements increase the likeliness of conversions. Built out of a test and learn concept, CRO has come to be common practice in many organisations.

Expedia has been quoted to be testing up to 50 different versions of their website.

Amazons former CIO, DR Werner Vogels said that they would test up to 250 variables on the homepage at any one time.

Facebook was running so many tests onsite and in the app, that they created their own release system that allowed people to enable / disable / Throttle feature in real time.

The nextbig thing

There are approximately close to 300+ organisations across Australia doing some form of CRO on their website, mobile site or App. In many cases they are doing basic forms of CRO, such as:

Although each brand may have their own personal objective, they are all generally focused on testing the variables that will optimise the customer experience for sales. In our experience we have found that basic optimisation can help increase sales conversion by as much as 17% as shown in the example below:

The nextbig thing

Within the same Gartner report, it was identified that 89% of companies surveyed by Gartner believe that customer experience will be their primary basis for competition in 2016.

This trend will see many brands balance there marketing budgets between lead generation and CRO to assist with conversion optimisation.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

and the super industry

Categorywatch

The super industry is a cluttered category with many new players competing for customer attention. Over the last 5 years a number of changes have started changing the face of the category.

1. T H E I N C R E A S E I N S E L F M A N A G E D S U P E R

In 2015 we performed a trends analysis for the NAB Superannuation FX conference. Our research found that between the periods of 2010 and 2015, there have been a massive influx in people looking for information relating to Self Managed Super and a heavy reduction in people seeking financial advice.

Legend: Financial Advice / SMSF

This trend will continue to grow with many expecting for a disruption model to put flip the category on its head. Most experts predict that an ‘Uber-esk' disruptor will enter the market and place the power back in the hands of customer rather than the institutions engaged to manage the funds.

2 . T H E R I S E O F R O B O - A D V I C E

With the expectation of disruption within the category, many digital start-ups are heavily investing in creating the next Uber of investment and super finance management. Many organisations such as Betterment, Acorn, netwealth and many more are making the process of understanding investment and access to global equities and diversified revenues.

3 . M AT U R I T Y O F D I G I TA L N AT I V E S

As ‘digital natives’ have grown so has their expectation of all channels and devices to deliver what they need, when they need it. Today, these natives have grown to drive much of the demands that organisations are reforming to fulfil. These are the customers that are empowered to take over their super and drive the changes they see fit.

Categorywatch

All of these trends are making digital a critical factor in the customer path or purchase and retention. Organisation like ING Direct and Australian Super are ahead of the curve.

Over the last 30 days both companies have been starting to test and optimising their site experiences.

A U S T R A L I A N S U P E R :

Australian Super has recently taken up the usage of Optimizely as their preferred testing platform. It is evident that they are new to the game as much of their testing has been limited to basic A/B testing around the ‘Login’ and ‘Join’ button location:

We can deduce from the study and our experience that a key focus for the organisation is to test the optimal location for the Join button. The ultimate goal of this test is to increase conversations by testing the optimal experience and positioning of the button.

Categorywatch

A U S T R A L I A N S U P E R C O N T I N U E D :

In early April, Australian Super tested their hero title proposition and call to action. As a macro change, we can assume the company is testing the same proposition using a different image, action and call to action.

We can only assume the image on the right and proposition had a great conversion rate as this has become current hero tile on the site. It is this type of testing and data insights that makes CRO such an important factor for brands.

I N G D I R E C T L I V I N G S U P E R :

Unlike Australian Super, ING has opted to use the Adobe site catalyst technology. Although ING uses CRO across its core banking site, it is apparent that much of the testing on the ‘Living Super’ site is basic if not being used at all. Much the tests can be mistaken for content changes.

From our analysis we can only assume that ING Direct Living super has the optimisation tags needed. However no formal testing has begun

Categorywatch

T H E O T H E R P L AY E R S

In our study of the sites we have found that only ING Direct Living Super and Australian Super are the only players within the category that are actively looking at or have started the process of CRO. This can only mean first mover advantage for these organisations. Unlike the rest of the category they will be able to grow their knowledge and develop process that will see them speed up their journey through the CRO maturity curve.

Outside of CRO we have also looked at the content updates key Superannuation companies have been making on their sites. Below are a snap shot of the changes happening within the category.

M E D I A S U P E R

Although Media Super is not running any CRO tags, it is obvious they are actively optimising their site using more analog methods to track performance. From our studies we have noticed weekly changes on the site to increase conversions. Much of the changes are aligned to macro changes such as hero tile propositions and lower page title promotional changes.

Categorywatch

C B U S

On the 14th of May, 2016, cbus re-developed their website to bring the site into the current standards required by their users.

Categorywatch

F I R S T S U P E R

Like most in the category First Super has been actively changing and testing the hero title proposition to engage users. This is also the case with host plus, Australian Super, Austsafe super. Although this is very rational one can conclude that it does not provide greater insight as to what elements on the page (besides the hero tile) can help engage customers.

K I N E T I C

Like Media Super, Kinetic are not running any formal tool for testing, this ultimately creates for complexity to they're testing, however we can see that at the end of April, they were testing the navigation prominence and hero tile button styles. These are great tests to run to encourage great impact on navigation and increase click-through-rates on buttons.

Categorywatch

H O S T P L U S

Much like the rest of the category host plus has been testing the integration of a ‘header banner’ for promotional offers. We can only assume that the business is so reliant on the hero tile as a navigational feature, that it has designed it’s way into a corner and is now trying to find new ways to communicate other offers.

In summary Given the current state of the category it is clear that many organisations are

reliant on their site as a communication and sales tool. Nearly all within the category are modifying their homepage hero tiles.

Organisations like Kinetic and Host Plus are actively testing different variations of their site, however given much of their work is running manually we can only imagine the difficulty in running tests this way. And, the risk of not being able to know if they have reached statistical significance with their respective tests.

Corporations such as Australian Super and ING Direct Life Super (to a lesser extent) will lead the market when it comes to site experience and conversion optimisation. The early adopter position they are taking will ensure that they will rapidly increase their knowledge and widen the gap for other corporations who will follow soon after.

Who is New Republique?

We are a design agency specialising in optimising customer experiences for incremental revenue growth. We do this by specialising in 3 services

We believe that great design has the ability to help people make better decision and live better lives.

We exist to service brands with an ambition to leapfrog their competition through the delivery of exceptional customer experience. Whether that be via increasing awareness of their existing products, building a ground-breaking new platform, or using data to better personalise the customer experience on a branded digital asset to drive more leads.

We are one of the few agencies that are accredited and supported by the top technologies in the world

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