What you need to know:

• Personalised Plates Queensland (PPQ) has overhauled marketing, courtesy of a technology uplift that gives it greater insights into a previously hard to track audience segment. Brand is now focused on future customers, and digital is much better equipped to do segmentation.
• Conversion rates are up almost 20 per cent, and customer satisfaction levels in the call centre are at 90 per cent.
• The service, managed by Publicis Groupe's Digitas also undertook a restructure to clarify the accountabilities for marketing and digital.
• The mix of technology in play includes Tealium, Dotdigital and Craft CRM.

"This must be the easiest product in the world not to buy," says Joshua Lee, General Manager of Personalised Plates Queensland (PPQ), reflecting upon his 'what was I thinking' moment after joining the personalised plate service business of the Queensland Government.

It is a significant earner for the state, bringing in $76m last year according to the Department of Main Roads and Transport's annual report. That's down from the previous year by about $5 million, a decline attributed to the normalisation of sales following a Covid-inspired growth spurt.

But with a restructure plus major overhaul of its marketing and analytics tech, as well as greater visibility over consumer behaviour, Lee is hoping the near 20 per cent uptick in conversions the team is now seeing will drive growth higher.

Managed by Publicis Red Lion, PPQ works together with the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads and is responsible for the marketing and sales of personalised number plates throughout the state. It is a surprisingly large business, with revenues putting it in the top 100 ecommerce businesses in Australia (and top five in the automotive/DIY category), on par with companies like Mitre 10 and Total Tools.

"Personalised plates sounded really simple when I first joined, I thought was gonna be really simple," Lee tells Mi3.

He soon discovered the truth – identifying prospects was difficult from a media perspective. With a strong career pedigree in the digital market black arts (including a stint at Digitas), Lee could see the immediate problem. "Nobody gives off a data signal that they're buying a personalised plate. You can’t go to the data and ask 'What’s a plate intender?' The marketing challenge is amazing. We have to be bang on with our marketing and our customer experience."

With that came the realisation PPQ needed to evolve and mature to have a chance at becoming a leader from an ecommerce perspective. Digitas was engaged to help make sense of the data.

"One of the first things they did was to run and hefty data analysis to really learn about who our audience was. That involved, for instance, geo-propensity modelling to better understand where customers were underrepresented and where the growth opportunities were," Lee explains.

Accountabilities

Team structures were also suboptimal. "We had a digital team and a marketing team, but nobody was really clear where marketing technology sat. Our digital team was full of developers. Our marketing team was full of really established brand marketers," Lee continues. "And from my background, I knew our growth would come through our enhancing customer experiences."

To that end, he created a new division called Digital Experience whose remit was to own customer experiences. The move also clarified lines of delineation, according to Lee.

With the data analysis done, a decision was made to shift the marketing strategy.

"Traditionally, there was always a product focus. You advertise one type of plate for a couple of months of the year, then you advertise NRL [National Rugby League] plates. But we decided to switch to an audience-first strategy and focused brand marketing on future customers. Then we would focus on various segments from there."

That process also fed into the technology overhaul, which involved the implementation of a CDP from Tealium, a new CMS from Craft CRM, and marketing automation tools from Dotdigital. 

Craft CRM and Dotdigital look like an obvious fit for the scale of an organisation like PPQ. But Tealium, which tends to play at the top end of the corporate channel – with prices to match – seemed like a top shelf choice. Mi3 put that question to Lee, who says a big part of the decision came down to data residency, a significant advantage for Tealium against rivals still investing in local infrastructure at the time.

There was also a unique element to the PPQ solution: The team developed its own auction platform in-house. "Everyone else uses a third party," says Lee. "It was a matter of us getting closer to the customer, and to really control that customer experience."

Maurice Riley, chief data officer for Publicis Group ANZ, which owns Digitas, agrees with Lee'ss assessment: "There is no data out there that tells us someone's a plate intender. We had to make sure we had control to know that the clean data and signals were able to drive the decisions.

"There was a lot of work being done to give us the signals to be able to understand it, as we were building brand and driving consideration and demand. Once that brand job was done, you had people considering and therefore putting signals out there in the market that we can understand."

By appending ABS and geo-demographic data to the transactional database, the teams were able to create a propensity model.

"That gave us what we call a gameplan matrix, so which postcodes and households were over indexing, which ones were under indexing, which ones were performing better," says Riley.

In turn, that helped to segment the database and allowed the business to focus on testing and learning to better understand where it could drive growth beyond natural incremental growth.

Double-digit improvements

The new system is operating well, and driving a much more qualified audience, says Lee. "That's allowed us to have a double-digit improvement in conversion rate – and we're only just getting started with our use cases. We've got the privacy use cases, and marketing efficiency use cases."

Plus, it's easier to deliver better customer experiences with the new platforms in place since selling personalised number plates comes with some unique complexities. When you buy a personalised number plate, every combination is unique. 

"If for instance you abandoned the shopping cart, we have to create a very specific abandoned cart journey for each customer," says Lee. "We're able to do that now, and that has a flow-on effect on customer service as customers have a much better experience.

"Our contact centre can spend more time servicing customers, and that's allowed us to have a 90 per cent approval rating on customer service."

Improvements came quickly once the system was running, says Lee. "Almost instantly, as soon as we launched the CDP, we were able to see a more qualified audience come forward. That was amazing, and we're still doing lots of test and learn."

True personalisation – of number plates – and heading for scale.