Amaysim, an Optus company, uses Twilio Segment to optimize campaign performance and reduce customer churn by AUD $7.3M

Amaysim is Australia’s leading low-cost mobile service provider, serving over 1.2 million customers. In 2021, Singtel Optus Pty Limited completed the acquisition of amaysim and it remains a standalone brand. Optus is the second-largest wireless carrier in Australia. 

Founded in 2010, amaysim has grown rapidly thanks to its strong commitment to customer experience and its laser focus on providing simplicity and transparency to customers. The company offers only five different SIM plans focused on the things that customers want most: no lock-in contracts, generous data inclusions, access to the Optus 4G Plus Network and plenty of surprising bonuses.

Most of all though, customers stay with amaysim because of the company’s ‘Little SIM, Big Love’ philosophy, which is aimed at delighting customers at every touchpoint. This is evidenced by the phenomenal NPS and customer satisfaction scores the company regularly achieves.

However, after successfully stealing market share for more than a decade, the competition was starting to catch-up with amaysim. Other providers were beginning to match the value and simplicity of amaysim’s SIM plans, as well as trying to emulate the company’s level of customer service.

Therefore, amaysim needed to change its strategy to stay ahead of the chasing pack and continue to differentiate its offer. This meant offering an ever better, more personalized experience to customers, based on accurate, real-time data.

However, amaysim didn’t have a single view of the customer, with some data held in different tools and systems across the tech stack. Marketers couldn’t always access the data they needed to roll out timely, relevant campaigns, and this was becoming a barrier to amaysim achieving its strategic goal of providing customers with more personalized experiences.

Amaysim turned to Twilio Segment in January 2020 to centralize and standardize its data across all of its channels. 

In doing so, it was able to:

• Create a single, unified view of the customer, based on accurate, high quality and compliant data

• Enable marketing teams to deliver personalized, relevant communications, leading to improvements in customer retention and lifetime value

• Democratize access to consistent, high quality data for all teams in the business and increase collaboration across the organization

Creating a single source of truth for customer data

In order to support its next phase of growth, amaysim needed to start delivering more timely and personalized communications and incentives to its customers.

However, as with many fast-growth businesses, amaysim did not have all the right data infrastructure in place to support this objective. The company had a tech stack that spanned multiple business units, with some data spread across separate systems and databases. This meant that to get a unified view of a customer’s data, marketers had to turn to the data team who would need to stitch this view together. In some instances, it could take longer than preferred to do this and subsequently execute a campaign, by which time the data could be out of date and customers could receive communications which were no longer appropriate or relevant. Not to mention the human errors that could occur in a manual process.

At the same time, data and engineering teams were sometimes also spending time dealing with requests for data supply, which was pulling them away from more high-value work. 

Amaysim needed to implement a data platform to centralize and standardize data from multiple sources, and create a single source of truth for all customer data. The company started to explore tools that could bring together data from across its channels, and then enable it to activate this data across its downstream marketing tools. 

One added complexity was the fact that, due to the nature of its business, amaysim needed to be able to generate customer level data and service level data at the same time, within the same platform. Martech tools usually activate data on the customer level, not service level and especially not on both customer and service level which was an amaysim data model requirement. So the team would need to build a custom solution. Such custom builds with other big vendors would not be as flexible, very costly, perhaps even impossible in some cases. 

“We needed a platform that offered us complete flexibility and that would enable us to move at speed. We didn’t want to have a long-winded integration or data migration program," says Kalda. "I knew from my extensive experience working within marketing technology that Segment was the only solution that could solve our challenges. No other provider would really work alongside us to build the custom solution that we needed, and certainly not at the pace that we wanted to go," she added.   

Unifying customer data and building audiences

Amaysim brought in Segment to integrate all data sources into a single Customer Data Platform (CDP), to track all event data across its channels and to create audiences for marketing communications.

Segment Connections enables amaysim to collect, unify and connect all of its customer data, and Twilio Engage (formerly known as Personas) allows the marketing team to create audiences for personalized marketing campaigns. Amaysim also uses Segment Protocols to optimize data governance and centrally manage policies around data security and privacy.

The company uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud as its email and SMS tool and a small number of downstream marketing tools, including Google Ads.

Segment is used widely by teams right across the business. Data teams use the platform to ensure data integrity and compliance with data privacy and security regulations, while product teams use the data to inform development strategy. Data within Segment is most heavily used by the CRM and customer acquisition teams for audience building and campaign activation.

“Segment touches every part of our business. There isn’t a single campaign, tool or piece of content that doesn’t rely on Segment to deliver success. Having Segment data is now absolutely critical to our ability to move at speed, respond to new opportunities and drive customer experience."

Karin Kalda, Senior Marketing Technology Manager at amaysim

Embracing a data-driven approach to reduce churn and drive creativity

By implementing Segment, amaysim has been able to automate 90% of its campaigns and, as a result, it is now able to run as many as 40 campaigns on a daily basis.

Crucially, due to the ease of use of the Segment platform, marketing teams no longer need to rely on the involvement of data and engineering teams to access the data they need for campaigns. They’re able to independently build cohorts within Segment themselves and then push this data through to CRM and email tools.

And once these campaigns are activated, they are now extremely low touch – marketing and support teams simply have alerts set up to monitor performance and flag any issues, so that they can make changes and optimize campaigns, where necessary.

This is freeing up significant amounts of time in the marketing department, but also within the data and engineering teams that no longer need to support data requests.

“The velocity at which we’re able to move has increased dramatically. We’re far more efficient in how we activate our data so we’re seeing much shorter time to value. On top of this, our agility to make decisions has improved, meaning that we are far quicker to respond to new opportunities and respond to customer needs,” says Kalda.

As a result of having Segment in place, amaysim has become more event-driven in its approach, proactively developing offers and communications based on real-time event data. For instance, the company is using event data to inform targeted and timely communications for customer onboarding, shopping cart abandonment and data usage alerts. Prior to Segment, amaysim simply didn’t have the level of visibility required to deliver this type of immediate response based on real-time events.

For example, amaysim is now able to spot traits to identify customers that are most likely about to leave and to immediately target them with ‘win back’ offers and incentives. Already, this churn management activity has prevented more than 28,000 people going elsewhere, worth AUD $7.3M in annualized revenue. In addition, the team has been able to leverage Segment to underpin existing and new personalized campaigns including:  

• Shopping Cart Abandonment reminder campaign driving $250k incremental revenue.

• Automated upsell campaigns driving ~2.5m incremental annualized revenue

• Automated Voucher payment customers journeys driving 66% reduction in failed renewals

• Voucher customers failing to add payment method on time and automatically would churn out; sending a timely reminder via Segment have saved them

• Real-time plan upgrade recommendation alerts driving 400k incremental annual revenue 

• Daily automated reactivation campaigns, driving 2.25% conversion

• Real-time Ad suppressions saving between average of 5% of the budget across channels

Kalda says, “thanks to Segment, we’ve become far more sophisticated in how we think about and use data. For instance, within our marketing teams, there’s a much greater understanding and ownership of data, and this is leading to better campaign ideas and brilliant creativity. We’re using Segment as a discovery tool and seeing opportunities that we would never have identified before."

Segment Protocols is also making compliance with data privacy and security regulations far easier. By using Segment to orchestrate and standardize all customer data and ensure quality and consistency, amaysim is taking a more proactive approach to data governance.

Looking ahead, amaysim is looking to start using Segment Journeys to execute multi-channel marketing orchestration and campaign activation. In doing so, it believes it can forge deeper, more sustainable relationships with customers, Karin explains:

“Thanks to Segment, we’ve now got a data infrastructure that really works for our business and can adapt to changing business and customer needs. The next step is to develop the content and campaigns that will allow us to fully unlock the power of this data to create enhanced, personalized customer experiences which will delight our customers and drive our business forward.”

Karin Kalda, Senior Marketing Technology Manager at amaysim