Creating an entertainment hub for anyone.
Foxtel uses personalisation through Adobe Experience Cloud to connect customers with their favorite shows.
Established
1995
Employees: 2,500
Sydney, Australia
http://www.foxtel.com.au/
Helium
Sydney, Australia
https://www.iamhelium.com.au/
4x
faster time-to-market for optimised experiences using a test-first approach
Objectives
Help customers find relevant shows, content, and value faster
Filter through bundles to keep from overwhelming customers with choices
Develop fun, entertaining digital experiences that will excite customers
Results
40x increase in customers signing up for streaming service with personalised web experience
4x faster time to market for optimised new experiences with test-first approach
30k customers driven to self-service website in four months over calling customer service
More than doubled website sales by optimising experiences through sales funnel
Ask Aris Kinnas what he loves about his job and his answer is simple: building awesome customer experiences. As Director of Digital at Foxtel, Australia’s leading subscription television company, that means creating experiences that customers find fun, snappy, and made just for them.
“During the COVID lockdowns, we saw the importance of helping customers find content that they love – something that will keep them entertained or teach them something new when they’re stuck at home,” says Kinnas. “The lockdowns showed how making a digital experience fun and easy could impact peoples’ lives.”
Kinnas wasn’t always in the media and entertainment business. For years he worked in the finance sector, using his background in economics, law, and finance to help build experiences that speak to individuals about loans, savings accounts, and mortgages. “Many bank products are fairly similar across the industry, but at the same time, money is a sensitive topic,” says Kinnas. “Marketing was always a careful balance of how we differentiated our products.”
When it comes to media and entertainment, the marketing focuses more on speaking directly to the customers and their preferences. “There’s so many different options today: free, premium, streaming, on-demand,” says Kinnas. “It’s easy for customers to get overwhelmed by choices. The challenge for us becomes how do we figure out what specific content customers want to see, and how do we help them find it quickly?”
“Helium is a big part of bringing our personalisation program to life faster. They’re helping us learn to crawl, walk, and run until we’re ready to take off with new customer experiences.”
Aris Kinnas
Director of Digital, Foxtel
Accelerating personalisation pace and scale
When Kinnas joined Foxtel, the company was already using Adobe Experience Cloud as the foundation for customer experiences. With the Adobe Experience Cloud apps, including Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Experience Manager, and Adobe Target, Foxtel had all of the pieces to scale out personalised experiences to all customers. But Kinnas recognised that the digital team wasn’t using the apps to their full potential.
To reach the company’s personalisation goals quickly, the digital team needed support from experts who could provide training and deliver a solid foundation for Foxtel to build upon. Foxtel chose to partner with Helium for its expertise in delivering personalisation at scale.
The engagement started out small with Helium overseeing tag migration and running a handful of targeted campaigns. Helium quickly demonstrated the results that can be achieved with mature Adobe Experience Cloud usage, delivering a 20% increase in sales through six campaigns. The relationship blossomed, and Helium now supports training efforts and creating the framework for successful digital experiences.
“One mistake people make is thinking that they need to create the entire experience foundation at once,” explains Puneet Srivastava, Chief Data Officer and co-founder of Helium. “We believe in a sprint model where Helium solidifies one part of the foundation, and then we hand it off to the Foxtel internal team. In that way, we can build internal knowledge while constantly optimising performance.”
“Helium is a big part of bringing our personalisation program to life faster,” adds Kinnas. “They’re helping us learn to crawl, walk, and run until we’re ready to take off with new customer experiences.”
“Around 13% of digital sales can be directly attributed to the success of our personalisation initiatives.”
Aris Kinnas
Director of Digital, Foxtel
Building a single experience for all products
Taking full advantage of the targeting and personalisation capabilities in Target, Foxtel creates web experiences that make it easier than ever for customers to find the shows that they’re looking for.
The company previously had separate websites for Foxtel, its traditional subscription television service, and Foxtel Now, its internet-based television service. Customers wanting to look at both products had to switch between sites, making it difficult to compare.
Using Experience Manager and Target, Foxtel built a simple experience that can fluidly switch between the Foxtel and Foxtel Now products. A comparison chart helps customer decide whether they want to learn about Foxtel or Foxtel Now in greater detail. Customers who come to the website after searching for a specific streaming title are dropped directly into the Foxtel Now experience. These customers were 40x more likely to start a trial immediately, while the overall personalised approach increased sales by 100% in less than 12 months.
Finding the right content for every customer
Delivering more personsalised customer experiences helps people find the best package for them. Foxtel decided that rather than attempt to compete with the growing number of media options for customers, it would position itself as a partner and aggregator for services such as Netflix, ABC iview, and SBS On Demand. But as the amount of content grows, so does the number of bundle options. Kinnas recognised that personalisation would be the key to helping customers find the right content quickly, which would result in happier customers and better performance overall.
Foxtel pulls together all known customer information, including subscriber details from an enterprise data warehouse and real-time customer behaviour information from Analytics, into Audience Manager to understand customer preferences. This audience information then feeds into Target to show customers only the most relevant information and content.
If a customer likes checking in on their favorite sports team, Foxtel will show all bundles that include sports and hide bundles that only include television and movies. By only showing the most relevant bundles, Foxtel cut down on overwhelming choices and increased sales by 10%.
Packages and pricing also change over time, creating multiple generations of subscribers. Someone who signed up for a legacy bundle might have a hard time comparing their bundle with more recent ones, or understanding what upgrades and add-ons are available to them. Adobe Target uses Audience Manager data to provide relevant options based on a person’s current package. In the first four months after introducing this change, 30,000 customers had a more personalised experience to understand their subscriptions – customers who would probably have called up customer service.
“Working with Helium, we’ve carried out up to 400 tests and personalisation activities on the website to provide customers with the best possible experiences,” says Kinnas. “Around 13% of digital sales can be directly attributed to the success of our personalisation initiatives.”
Faster time-to-market with test, learn, build
Having an agile website is a critical part of how Foxtel quickly builds and optimises customer experiences. Kinnas attributes the change to the new “test, learn, build” approach adopted at Foxtel using Target.
Normally, Foxtel followed a traditional “build, test, learn” approach to optimising experiences. A team would design and build out a new experience in Experience Manager Sites. When the experience went live, the digital team would test variations with Target and then take what was learned from those tests to rebuild optimised experiences.
Kinnas flipped the process upside down. Now the Foxtel team works with Helium to quickly create tests to determine whether a new experience will work. After learning from the results, Foxtel then builds out the full backend experience. This process cuts a lot of time and effort previously spent rebuilding experiences, helping Foxtel get to the optimised experience up to 4x faster.
When Foxtel first partnered with Netflix, for example, Kinnas quickly realised that customers were confused by the way the company was presenting its new Netflix bundles. With sales not as expected, Kinnas asked the UX team to brainstorm new experiences.
“Within a week, Helium helped us launch tests and find an experience that drove a large improvement in website sales,” says Kinnas. “By jumping straight to testing, we saw results in a week instead of months, greatly boosting our website sales. We continued to iterate on the experience throughout the shopping funnel, ultimately more than doubling website sales.”
“Adobe Experience Cloud gives us the speed to act on an idea and start seeing the results the same day. With that agility, we can accelerate our digital transformation and create better experiences for customers and results for the company.”
Aris Kinnas
Director of Digital, Foxtel
Using data to deliver results
“One thing that sets Foxtel apart is it really uses the integration between Adobe Experience Cloud apps to deliver results,” says Harold Janson, Chief Personalisation Officer and co-founder of Helium. “Insights from Analytics create audiences through Audience Manager. That data becomes an action in Target to change the experience in Experience Manager. By making that flow of data more fluid, Foxtel is developing better experiences for customers.”
Kinnas adds, “Digital native companies have taught customers to have high expectations for their digital experiences. Adobe Experience Cloud gives us the speed to act on an idea and start seeing the results the same day. With that agility, we can accelerate our digital transformation and create better experiences for customers and results for the company.”
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