When Amber Collins was lured from Coles by former News Corp digital boss Nicole Sheffield to join her at Australia Post with then CEO Christine Holgate, the master plan to entirely overhaul the $9bn delivery behemoth – it handles 2.7bn items a year – had marketing as a core part of the transformation job. It need more than a cosmetic lift.  

Collins was handed the B2C and B2B remits but along with marketing’s poor standing within the business, the two units were misaligned and Australia Post was facing nimble new challengers picking off lucrative metro delivery routes while the Post red trucks and posties were bound by law to deliver across the entire country. It wasn’t pretty. 

“There was no brand platform, there was no brand assets, there was no customer plan, there was no marketing strategy,” Collins told Mi3. “Media was being bought completely inefficiently and culturally the team was not well regarded in the enterprise.  So this has been a long build to completely change the way we operate. The B2B activity was operating one way and the consumer activity was operating another. It was as if they came from different companies.”

Then Covid hit and Australia Post was a lightening rod for an overheating delivery and logistics system faced by all.

Collins set about the overhaul with a new “Delivering for Australia” organising idea – but the ads were way down the food chain. Collins and her restructured marketing team, which included a large and previously unwieldy insights unit, set about fixing the operational issues and educating Australia Post’s blue chip customers and the 200,000 small business on its My Post business platform about the incremental improvements the entire supply chain could make to improve delivery times. 

“Everyone in Australia always gravitates to advertising,” said Collins. “Advertising is just one very small portion of what we do as far as the [marketing] plan is concerned. If you think about Australia Post, it's bigger as a retail network than Coles, Aldi and Woolworths combined. We have 4,300 Post Offices, 3,500 of which are licensees. So I'm just as proud of the fact that we've created massive posters that go into customer distribution centres teaching people where – and where not – to put labels, optimised labelling.

One per cent gains, aggregated

"With the labour shortages you've got a lot of new labour coming into the supply base, not just at our end but at our merchant end as well. If we can get them to do better, then the end receiver does better. They're obviously reliant on us and they're reliant on us performing well from an [on-time] perspective – but they can do loads of things to improve the way they manage their supply chain as well," she adds. 

"So if you've got you're a big customer, let's pick Cotton On, and you're doing 30,000 orders a day and you've got team members working, packing but their labelling is poor, you've slowed down everything by two days – because the package just spins around in distribution centres.”

Equally less glamorous for advertising types was the first “digital toolkit” last year for Post customers teaching them what they need to do for an order to be ready in peaks period like Black Friday and Christmas.

“We even send out calendars so they all know when it's coming this year because when you're a small business they are absolutely desperate for information. They are looking for help to do it better all the time. I think that's a really important part of what we do, which is what I say to the team – be useful. Just do things that are useful to customers, not try to sell them stuff. Just be useful and then the sales will come."

Lockers, she said, is another example.  

"In offering customers the ability to use a locker, they're more likely to have good delivery experience – because you'll never be [mailbox] carded. It'll go straight to locker and it’s much better for apartment dwellers too. So really what makes the difference is under the hood," said Collins. "Over the last few years I spent the whole time ensuring we are fully integrated into the business. We are a supply chain business. We're not sitting on the outside commenting, we're trying to help and to the earlier point, it’s about being really useful because all these things, so many things, are one percenters. But when you're delivering 52 million parcels in a peak season, lots of one percent improvements make a real difference. If you've got talented customer orientated people in marketing, which we do, who can work well with others across the business to solve customer problems, you're in a pretty good space.”

Do, then say

Without all the operational improvements for customers that Collins speaks of, there was a high risk Australia Post’s advertising claims were just fluff – or worse, counterproductive. Collins put Australia Post on TV for the first time in years with a brand campaign, along with a host of other channels. It was this work along with the behind-the-scenes operational and educational programs which she says helped Post bounce back fast and strongly in brand reputation tracking after the Covid logistics meltdown hit the country. 

“You’ve go to sweat the small things,” she says. “Your point is a good one. if I was concerned about the delta between what we're saying and the reality, I certainly wouldn't do it. I would never miss the first law of marketing: don't drive to a bad experience. But we have confidence in the volumes at the moment. We have confidence in our metric that the industry uses which is delivery in full, on time – what proportion of your packages have arrived when they're supposed to? We were down in the 70s through Covid. We like it to be always in the 90s but even when things went really badly for us, when Covid hit, when the volumes went through the roof and everything else, our operational NPS – which means our actual individual experiences, if you received the parcel and were annoyed because it took two weeks instead of two days – they dropped. But our overall trust metrics hardly moved and they've now all regained. That's because we continue to invest in the brand and demonstrating our role to Australians.”

Stripping roster, moving money to B2B

What about the marketing overhaul to increase what she calls customer facing media? It resulted in a 40 per cent increase in her B2B budgets. Collins “moved stacks of money” out of fixed marketing costs that was previously thought to be well spent. “I dramatically increased the amount of money I was spending on B2B by about 40 per cent,” she said. “There was a lot of unnecessary fixed costs that we were paying. We had multiple agencies in the roster, very inefficient briefing, very inefficient as was media buying. We outsourced very simple design pieces, simple content. We have a very sophisticated insights program but it was too heavy on a lot of operational metrics and not deep enough on customer insights. So rebalancing that took a lot of cost out. All this stuff enabled us to get more and more money in the right places. And as I say, we increased the B2B budget by about 40 per cent.”

The budget reworking also allowed Australia Post to take an "always on" strategy in advertising and communications rather than its historical burst strategy.

"The sort of fireworks strategy that some people have is just not appropriate for a brand like us. So we’re always on now. Our budgets compared to [many] big advertisers, are small. Obviously, compared to a lot of others it’s large, but the awareness, the spontaneous awareness of that line was incredible – and much higher than some of the other big brands that have been in market for a lot longer, spending a lot more money in brackets.”

When asked about business results and proof points, Collins provide three strategic priorities and their impact: 

Case 1: Raise awareness and consideration of business solutions 

• Awareness target: 10 per cent increase in awareness of MyPost Business amongst SMB customers during the campaign period.
• Result: Lifted awareness from 38 per cent in the month preceding the campaign to 50 per cent following the campaign, at an increase of 12 per cent year-on-year. 
   
• Consideration target: 5 per cent increase in consideration of MyPost Business amongst SMB customers during the campaign period.
• Result: Improved consideration from 27 per cent to 37 per cent following the campaign, at an increase of 10 per cent year-on-year.

Case 2: Drive customer enquiries and registrations

• Enquiries target: 5,000 new business leads.  
• Result: In total, the two campaign phases generated 7,508 new business leads with an opportunity value of $8.5m. 
   
• Registrations target: 5 per cent increase in MyPost Business registrations year-on-year.
• Result: New business leads converted into registrations, leading to 8 per cent increase year-on-year.

Case 3: Propel the SMB segment into double digit revenue growth 

• Target: 10 per cent increase in SMB revenue year-on-year (5 per cent above category benchmark).
• Result: Overall SMB segment revenue was up 32 per cent year-on-year.

Collins takeout is this: “The ‘Delivering for Australia’ campaign has been the most successful campaign ever done at Australia Post. We’ve got a brand platform that resonates with small businesses." And the numbers show it.