Driving engagement and growth through segmentation. Engagement conference, 22 October 2015
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In October 2015, Which? outlined its segmentation strategy aimed at building a supporter base of 1 million by 2018 to drive engagement and change for consumers. Analysis of supporter data revealed significant disparities in engagement, leading to the implementation of initiatives like a welcome journey to improve follow-up actions from new supporters. The project achieved increased supporter activity and insights into supporter behaviors, enabling targeted communications and ongoing improvements in engagement strategies.
Driving engagement and growth through segmentation. Engagement conference, 22 October 2015
- 1. Driving engagement and growth through segmentation October 2015
- 2. • Which? is a group social enterprise • We’re independent, apolitical and work for all consumers. • Funded solely from commercial ventures, no government money or fundraising • We want to make individuals as powerful as the organisations they have to deal with in their daily lives • Supporter Strategy and Engagement Team set up in 2013 • Tasked with building an active supporter base of 1 million by 2018 Which?
- 3. What we set out to achieve with our segmentation Actions that we took and learned along the way The difference it has made to engagement and growth What we’re going to cover
- 4. The goals of our segmentation work • Objective • More actions from more supporters delivering more change for consumers • Strategy • To understand our supporters better and build a strong relationship with them using the right message, right tone and offering the right actions • A flexible approach • To improve the quality and accessibility of our own data • To perform regression analysis on past supporter data to see what can be learned • Engage Populus for behavioural segmentation research and analysis
- 5. Our data and CRM • Immediately identified as a major barrier to success • Limited data on supporters • In two different systems • Time consuming to find even basic things • Couldn’t easily track activity or engagement levels • Required lots of manual shifting of data – inherent risk
- 6. Integrated CRM - an essential foundation • Requirements • Able to cope with a database that will grow to well over a million people • Integrated - key data in one place where it can be easily accessed and used • Strong testing and reporting tools • Able to deliver automated welcome journeys and other content • Flexible and easy to use enabling us to create different content quickly • A system that will be invested in and developed • Legally compliant
- 7. The best things in life are free… - the almost free elements of our project
- 8. • So many questions that we wanted to know the answer to… • Which supporters are super active and which are inactive? • Which supporters take social actions and which only sign petitions? • Why supporters have joined us? • What supporters think about our campaigns? • What kind of people (values and beliefs) are our supporters? • What do our supporters want for us going forward? Our 2014 supporter survey...
- 9. The survey • 20 questions covering behaviour, attitudes and demographics • Used Survey Monkey as platform to enable easy analysis • Split people into five potential segments to see if they worked as a group • Members, paid acquisition, recently acquired, longer standing, inactive • Pushed survey three times to supporters in September 2014 – 24,000 responses • Strong take up (20% click to open rate for survey and 72% completion rate)
- 10. What we learnt and what we did • Useful data on what people thought of our current campaigns and what they wanted us to prioritise going forward • Data on their values, attitudes and behaviours • Information about their involvement with other charities and organisations - just how busy our supporters are with other organisations • Demographic data and information about supporter habits (eg newspapers read and social network habits) • Significant differences between members, organic supporters, inactive and paid acquisition supporters ACTION Introduce segmentation v1 ACTION Punchier messaging ACTION More campaign activity ACTION Keep asking supporters
- 11. • Once we started to look in more detail at our inactives, we found that: • 78.5% of long term inactives had only taken their first action • Over 90% of paid acquisition inactives had only taken their first action • Primary objective of Welcome Journey was to persuade new supporters to take a second action with Which? and quickly • Launched in November 2014 • 5 stage journey over 20 days - included petitions, polls, survey and a Which? campaigns round up Putting ideas into practice - Welcomes
- 12. Welcome journey results 5 months on • As hoped, at the end of the Welcome Journey, the number of people taking a second action was much higher than those in the control group • But this effect has continued beyond the welcome journey. In Q1 of 2015, 8% more have been active • 27% increase over Control 38 30 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 WJ Control % taking action in Q1 only
- 13. • Prior to 2014, Which? relied on a monthly email newsletter • Abandoned in late 2013. Replaced by more regular single issue emails with a strong increase in open rates and activity levels • Our survey showed a strong appetite for our campaigns • We set out to increase engagement by sending more emails - closer to one per week on topical, relevant issues • A lot of attention to getting content right, testing and monitoring of results • More use of polls and surveys to involve people in our campaigns • Significantly more people taking actions because of this Increasing volume of communications How often are you home? If an organisation called on you 12 times in a year, how many times would they catch you in?
- 14. • By the middle of 2015, we could see a marked improvement in supporter activity • Average supporter actions up from 2-3 actions a year to 3.6 actions per year • Click to open rates increased from 23% to 33% • Open rates down by 4% - but inevitable for list size • Members not always our most active segment • Being outperformed by some of our new sources • Number of long terms inactives down • Without specific reactivation action, we have reduced the number of long term inactives over 9 months by 17% • Welcome journey getting more people active • But could be improved • Lots more knowledge about supporters from our surveys and, by this stage, our Populus work Good early steps, but how to improve?
- 15. Welcome journey 2.0 High take up actions (polls) earlier in the journey Simplify survey to increase completion rates Poll actions doubling click rates compared to petitions Segmentation 2.0 Introduced action levels (hot/warm/cold) Introduced new Super Supporters segment Other subgroups grown – social sharers, rural supporters, etc Reactivation trials Split into non openers (8 stage) and openers (4 stage) 5 stages across 2 weeks using a range of subjects/asks Non openers 15.2% success Openers 18.5% success More actions that drove engagement
- 16. Because it’s worth it - paid elements of our project
- 17. • Gave us a very detailed look at past behaviour of supporters telling us: • That the average supporter was taking 2-3 actions per year, but most engaged could be taking 12 or more actions • Which recruitment sources the most engaged supporters came from • Which campaigns had been best in the past at reactivating supporters Regression analysis ...but found little link or patterns between supporters of different campaigns
- 18. Project’s impact on Which? • Our objective was more actions from more supporters delivering more change for consumers • We think we’re getting there and here’s what we think the best outcomes have been for Which? : • Integrated tools/database that allow us to track behaviour, test effectively and learn more • Deeper understanding about what makes all supporters and segments of them tick • Identification of key supporter groups that we can target actions at – social sharers, super supporters, inactive (reactivation) and new supporters (welcome journeys) • And learning which content and actions our supporters do not enjoy! • Supporters at the heart of campaigns – from influencing messaging and content through to appearing on the media as case studies • Better knowledge about what kind of supporters we should be looking to recruit going forward
- 19. Don’t stop us now... Any questions? Ali Goldsworthy - [email protected] @aligoldsworthy Shaun Roberts - [email protected] @shaunr_lb
- 20. Visit the CharityComms website to view slides from past events, see what events we have coming up and to check out what else we do: www.charitycomms.org.uk