Building for the future.
Spark New Zealand personalisation ambition supported by Adobe Experience Cloud products is starting to pay big.
70%
Email open rate for targeted campaigns
Objectives
Build customer brand affinity, drive revenue, and increase efficiency
Enhance operational efficiency and optimise marketing initiatives
Boost subscriber retention and cross-sales for add-ons with personalised plan recommendations and offers
Enable internal team to handle campaign preparation in-house faster
Results
Achieved 50% increase in digital customer journeys and 20% drop in call centre volumes
Increased brand scoring over the past three years and delivered wide reaching efficiencies throughout the marketing department
Saw an average 70% email open rate and 53% click-through rate for campaigns promoting ideal mobile and broadband plans
Decreased creation time for email templates and workflow set up from more than a week to just a few days
Spark NZ (New Zealand) has consistently pursued widespread personalisation. Its rapid strides in this domain have heralded numerous new campaigns, receiving acclaim from customers, and earning accolades. Recently, Spark introduced proactive plan recommendations and website personalisation tailored to individual customer preferences.
While price markdowns often lure new customers, reducing prices for existing customers is less customary. However, Spark, the nation's largest telecommunications and digital services company, is reaping rewards from this unconventional growth strategy.
To ensure optimal outcomes for both customers and the business, the marketing department leveraged its in-house AI and ML capabilities in conjunction with Adobe Experience Cloud products. This synergy facilitated proactive suggestions for the ideal Spark mobile or broadband plan based on crucial data such as individual usage patterns. Consequently, this approach significantly impacted the cross-selling and upselling of various products. This program of work has an average 70% email open rate and 53% click-through rate.
But the company’s ambition went beyond email personalisation — Spark wanted to create a connected journey throughout all its customer touchpoints.
“Spark's experience optimisation ambition is to make customer journeys better each time customers engage with us,” says Jackey Lau, Domain Chapter Lead – Digital Optimisation at Spark. “By leveraging data and insights to understand their struggles, we continuously find opportunities to improve their experience.”
“Reusable components provide brand consistency and authoring efficiency. Then, we use insights from Analytics to see how our components and content are contributing to successful customer journeys.”
Holly Riverton
Chapter Lead - Content Design, Spark
Streamlined omnichannel personalisation at scale
Many customers first come to Spark through its website. The company identifies unknown prospects browsing mobile phones, accessories, and other services and harnesses insights on visitor behaviors using Adobe Analytics in conjunction with Spark’s own AI and ML capabilities to personalise experiences. Adobe Campaign orchestrates and activates customer experiences across various outbound channels. For inbound channels, Spark harnesses the power of Adobe Campaign integrations and facilitates data-sharing between products, utilising Adobe Target to effectively activate tailored experiences.
“The seamless integration of these products has significantly enhanced our operational efficiency and provided a comprehensive platform for optimising marketing initiatives,” says Brad Morris, Domain Chapter Lead – Martech at Spark. “This synergy not only amplifies data visibility but also augments flexibility across channels, empowering us with multiple tactics to drive impactful marketing strategies in a connected and streamlined manner.”
Marketers personalise communications across many channels, from email to mobile messages, in-app messages, the website, social media, and Spark’s interactive voice response (IVR) system.
Frontline agents utilise an API that bridges the Adobe environment and CRM system dashboard. This integration empowers agents to access personalised offers for each customer, ensuring that they’re equipped with the most enticing and relevant promotions tailored to individual preferences.
Spark also uses Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Adobe Experience Manager Assets for headless content management to deliver content for various channels, including its mobile app. Single-page applications (SPAs) and component libraries allow Spark’s content designers to author and deploy components with analytics embedded by default.
The content design team uses Content Fragments to save time when rotating out promotional offers every two to four weeks. If the team needs to change a promotion’s legal copy or disclosures, they make the edits on a single Content Fragment and apply the change universally.
Spark’s design system helps the team stay on brand and includes quick links to various design elements, templates, and guidelines.
Spark’s new design system uses reusable components and templates in Experience Manager. This allows teams to create high-quality experiences on demand without bespoke development effort, ensuring a quick time to market. These components are built with accessibility principles in mind.
“Reusable components provide brand consistency and authoring efficiency. Then, we use insights from Analytics to see how our components and content are contributing to successful customer journeys,” says Holly Riverton, Chapter Lead - Content Design at Spark.
“Through a steadfast commitment to automation and personalisation, we've achieved greater commercial success and naturally evolved into a more data-driven entity.”
Travena Addenbrooke
Domain Chapter Lead for Performance Marketing and AI, Spark
Increasing returns through continuous improvement
In 2023, Spark focused on maximising efforts in adopting capabilities across the Adobe Experience Cloud product suite. In collaboration with the NZ Adobe Ultimate Support team, this strategic focus yielded significant results, propelling Spark into the top 5% worldwide when benchmarked against its industry peers.
“We are hungry for improvement and maximising the return on investment for our existing Adobe products has been our central focus,” says Morris. “Through environment reviews and adoption measurements, we've successfully identified and implemented improvements, enhancing efficiency and unlocking additional capabilities. This positions us on a robust foundation as we venture into uncharted territory, paving the way for future progress and success.”
Since migrating to Campaign from its legacy platform in 2019, Spark increased automation in its marketing operations by 60%. Before the migration, creating email templates and setting up workflows required assistance from outside vendors and took more than a week. Now Spark completes these steps internally within just a few days. The improvements give the Spark team more time to strategise on new campaigns and improve how customers navigate increasingly complex journeys.
"Through a steadfast commitment to automation and personalisation, we've achieved greater commercial success and naturally evolved into a more data-driven entity,” says Travena Addenbrooke, Domain Chapter Lead for Performance Marketing and AI, at Spark. “Our teams strive daily to meet and exceed customers' needs and expectations.”
“Looking ahead, Spark’s marketing teams are actively exploring enhancements to our creative content supply chain. Our commitment lies in leveraging generative AI to elevate personalisation and to scale content production seamlessly.”
Brad Morris
Domain Chapter Lead – Martech, Spark
Building for tomorrow
Spark’s brand team leads the market with impactful, highly branded initiatives. These communication efforts now oversee distinct subscriptions, a capability previously unavailable. This enhances customer engagement, fosters stronger brand loyalty, and bolsters retention. For instance, customers can enlist in Spark Music's email updates for early access to concerts and entertainment. Similarly, business customers can subscribe to Spark Business Lab, unlocking tailored thought leadership content, exclusive events, and digital resources to fuel their business growth.
Applying customer insights to create simpler and more intuitive customer experiences is making a difference. The number of customers using digital journeys is up 50%, while call centre volumes are down by 20%. With customised offers seamlessly integrated across channels, and customer journey completion rates up 4%, this is proof that the data unification and use of Adobe products positively impact Spark.
“Spark’s test and learn culture, coupled with a data-driven approach, guarantees that we continuously value and optimise every customer journey,” says Matt Bain, Marketing and Data Director at Spark.
In a three-year strategy outline, Spark noted it was on track to achieve more than NZ$30M in 2023 fiscal year revenues, attributed to deep customer insights. Along with more than NZ$40M in cost efficiencies due to simpler, more intuitive customer experiences. “With a population that has grown more than 45% in the past three decades, New Zealand offers great opportunities. By embracing our personalised, data-driven approach, Spark is making good on its vision to help all of New Zealand win big in a digital world,” says Addenbrooke.
"Looking ahead, Spark’s marketing teams are actively exploring enhancements to its creative content supply chain,” says Morris. “Our commitment lies in leveraging generative AI to elevate personalisation and to scale content production seamlessly. By harnessing this technology, we aim to automate creative assets at scale based on timely and relevant data, ultimately delivering world-class customer journeys.”
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