Hi there, my name is Peter Bray. I lead the customer success team across APJ for SAP Customer Experience Engagement Cloud, formerly known as Emarsys. We brought customers together to focus on the 100 days before the peak sale period of end of financial year. And so over the next 10-ish minutes and 10-ish slides, I'm going to share with you what we covered in those sessions. Now, we all know June is a pretty busy period, but it's also worth understanding that our customers are not dormant in those months that lead up to it. So during this influence phase, what are the things that we can do so that we capitalize on the transaction phase? And I like to think of it like a gym membership. The sooner you get started, the sooner you put in the work, the sooner, you'll start to see the results. The ANZ consumer is expected to spend more than $10 billion during this period. And a lot of that spending is intentional. It's with purpose. It's planned. And the tailwinds is that we've got this tax time justification element as well that is unique to us. So when we look at other markets at this time of year, we don't see this big kick of what we call the attack, which is when the sales or discounts are launched. And we're also not seeing what I call the stalking phase or the wait, the period that leads up to it, even though you will see a lot of signals, whether that's store traffic, whether that visits to your website, whether that high cut additions, you're not being ghosted. The customers are just planning and they're waiting for their time to strike. We also know that it's about meeting customers with great experiences wherever they want to be met. And we do know that the mobile is a really important part of consumer behavior across the funnel. And it's also about the time in which they're spending with that device where you can meet them via the channels that matter the most. And so when we think about mobile, what we also need to focus on is that the experience is seamless as possible for not just browse, not just continue to push them through the file, but also through conversion. When we look at our different channels and in particular, our paid media, our paid-media advertising, the nature of that beast is that it is an auction-based environment. So as demand increases, so does cost. So how do we look at our own channels to mitigate that or to kind of normalize the increase in demand? Because what we see from our own channel research as well is that in June, yes, we do have conversions increase, but that isn't independent of the months leading up to it. The work that you do before that is what helps with such high conversion rates in the EOFY period. The thing to think about, your own channels can mitigate that increased cost from paid media so that they turn into a profitability engine. Now, email as a channel can be used for many things. Yeah, you can continue to educate your customers and reinforce brand value. If you've got those signals of intent, you can start to continue to push them through understanding more about the products or keep them excited. You might want to give some customers early access and then you also want to make sure you can use the channel for the bottom of the funnel conversion as well. But email is where you can turn your browsers into planners, into converts and purchases too. When we think about SMS, we wanna use this in the right way. We can focus on immediacy. So launch drops, last calls, sales have just been announced. We don't wanna use it for the BAU engagement. Segmentation is what drives profitability. You have loyalists who are likely going to buy anyway. You might have the tax optimizers who, yeah, they're going to spend, but they're buying in different ways to those who are your everyday or your more loyal customers. You've got deal hunters. These are the ones who don't really care about where they buy from, but they just really want to purchase at the best possible price. And then we've got the window shoppers and they might spend a lot of time looking around. So you've got to think about how you can engage them via other channels to convert with you versus someone else. So the key thing to think about how do you use segmentation as a profitability driver because you're loyalists, for example if you're giving them too much discount then you're pretty much just leaving money on the table. That's a really interesting way of thinking of time being traded for margin. And by time, we mean leading up to that peak period. So some of your VIPs or your loyalists, they're probably more interested in a lower discount, but ensuring that they can secure the size, the colorways, the styles that they care most about. Versus the public access folk who might be more driven by a higher discount, but the risk that they run is they're not going to get the stock that they're actually after. So, how do we, when looking at our VIPs or our loyalists, how do we work with some FOMO to make sure that we're fulfilling their needs and desires. The other key thing to focus on is, it's not just about getting that conversion. We don't just want that sugar hit, that rush at that period because we really wanna get profitability from our second and third purchase. But we also have to focus on returns because returns should be a seamless exceptional transaction, but it's also an opportunity to cross sell from that point. So it's not just about the point of conversion, it's about making sure you can meet and exceed the customer expectations in the time that follows. So there's a couple of things there that you might have already had in your strategy, you might've already planned for, and maybe what we've done is just reinforce some of that thinking. And what we have here are a couple of key things to think about that you can execute now in that warmup phase in pre-peak. And then also when you get to that June period, where it's going to be a bit crazy, but if you've done the work before, you're ready to rock and roll with it there. So there's a couple of things to think about in the 100 days that lead up to end of financial year. And with this strategy, hopefully, if you're winning June, you win in July, that's it. You've done your job from there. I'd now like to hand over to Casper to take you through some more strategies that can help you win this EOFY. What we've been through from Pete is a bit of an overview of what's going on in consumer psychology across Australia before end of financial year. And so now what I want to do is delve into exactly what to do, you know, the 12 steps to take. Now I've got this time before end of the financial year sales to set your brand up for success, not only for the sale that is currently coming up. But for future sales. Early on in my career, I was working with an e-commerce brand and like all e-commerce brands, its goal was to grow and grow aggressively. And one thing we figured out early on was that emails were a really reliable way of driving revenue. And so what do you do when you find a lever that works? You keep pulling it again and again, and it worked. It absolutely worked, but over time, we saw declining performance. And so this view of what to do before end of financial year is partially what I wish I knew when I was working on that brand. How to move from a more ad hoc and it's always on sales mentality to the base to a more strategic way of using sales to improve results. A little about me before we get started. I've been in advertising and marketing for over 10 years now. And I spent a lot of that time really focusing on how to make effective marketing, effective lifecycle activities. And I've then been recognized by the Effe's and even the IPAs over in London for doing so. I've worked with some of Australia's biggest brands, setting up CRM and lifecycle, including Brownside Forex, Bridgestone. And I'm also notoriously obsessive with whatever's taking my fancy. So I've got certs in powerlifting, I've got certs in data engineering, I'm also a competitive powerlifter, amateur cook, occasional jiu-jitsu grappler, all that sort of stuff. What are we trying to do here? Really, what we're trying to do is we know that there's always revenue pressures around sales periods. What can happen, though, is if you're not strategic about your sales, you end up a little bit like brand one. You launch a sale, get a sales uplift, you get a decline, another sale, another uplift, and then the client. And so if we're losing margin each sale, if we have limited segmentation in a database, if we don't build in customer intelligence through each sale and we don't have a really good defined post-purchase journey, we kind of can go nowhere. Whereas if we are brand two, for example, we've got some more targeted offers that only target the high value offers to our high value customers. If we've thought about how to reward our loyalty base, If we're building customer intelligence with each sale about all the customers that come into us and we're nailing our post-purchase journey, then over time we can start to build a lot more sustainable performance and an enduring competitive advantage. So that's what this presentation is really about. What makes these two things different and then therefore what steps to take. That's before, during and after end of financial year. So before sales, it's really about setting up the foundations, setting up automated segments, setting up the right programs, and setting up our infrastructure to capture the right source of data about our customers. During the sale, it is really about maximizing revenue, margin, and improving the customer experience using all the tools that you have. And lastly, after sale, it's about converting that single sale into multiple ones. What we'll do is walk through each period and we'll go through the key things to do at each one. At the end, you'll have 12 steps to take before end of financial year to be able to do this. So before end financial year, what are we trying to do? We're trying to basically set our foundations. And the way we do this is we do three things. Take a look at our segmentation and see how it can segment our database more intelligently. We will look at out automations. We'll do an audit. We'll make sure we've got all the effective automations that we need. And then we'll also implement progressive profiling. So we'll use this sale period to gather more information about our customers, which will allow us to make better recommendations over the long term. So, first of all, segmentation. Often times there's a risk that we get stuck in one type of segmentation in our life cycle programs and so here's an opportunity to use different types. Really there are three types of segments that are quite valuable to use and all have different roles in terms of the goals that we want to hit. First one is AI segments. So what this does it looks at behavior and tries to next behavior, it can predict: average car value, it can predict whether someone's likely to churn or someone's likely to convert in the next 30 days and it can also predict engagement with particular channels. And like Pete alluded to earlier, these segments are really good for protecting margin because we can understand who is more likely to buy and who is likely to by a lot which allows us to tailor our offers to those people that are most receptive, or minimizing offers to those that are not as well-spent. You've also got post-purchase segments, so these are your classic life cycle segments. These are really good for, you know, if you want to understand who your inactive or elapsed customers are. You can do that, you can provide them life cycle offers, you can also understand what they've purchased in the past and this allows you to tailor your recommendations to them, you have based on what brands or categories they've bought in the past. And then lastly you have your behavioral segments and if you think about that there's sort of dual functions of marketing, one, to build future demand, and then two, to convert current demand. These segments are all about maximizing that current demand and based on us seeing behaviors like abandoning cart, abandoning browse, how can we convert those people and nudge them towards our brand? Also, if we're thinking about segments like window shoppers, how can you retarget those people through a different channel? To be able to go ahead and purchase. So we'll talk a little more in more detail about exactly what segmentations to use with protecting margin. But the other thing you want to take a look at before end of financial year sale is what sort of life cycle triggers you do have. So this is really a good summary of all the different types of life-cycle triggers you can have across the various points in the customer journey from awareness to retention. And there are a few key ones that we recommend that we see work really well that we'd advise you to have. And if you don't have them, now's the time to put them into place. First one, lookalike audience contacts, right? Super easy, allows you to find people that look like your hardware customers. Because you'll have a lot of people coming into your brand, the acquisition area, is really important. So you want to make sure you've got a welcome program, you have a program to convert leads. You've got your abandoned browse card set up like we talked about a little earlier. You've got your progressive profiling and startup journey sorted and you've got a way to retarget these leads through social media. You'll also have a ton of first time buyers coming through, so it's important to have the first, second time buyer program ready to go, as well as some sort of cross-sell, if this is not included in your first, second time buyer program. In terms of active buyers, we talk about this all the time. There's a reason price drop is one that's really easy to set up. It's also super, super effective. So having that and making sure you can maximize your discounts will be really important for your sales period as well as it needs to be back in stock. If you're launching products that are coming back in stock and they're going on sale and people are already interested in them, that's a really key one to have. So I encourage you to take a look at this list, take a look at your current lifecycle, if you're missing any now it's time to action those. The last one is the most complex, but also one that is incredibly effective. We talk about this like progressive product filing, and what progressive profiling is, is gradually gathering more data on your customers over time. And so the way you do this is by using things like quizzes during the signup flow to understand what customers are looking for, what their pain points are, and what they might be interested in. Here's a little bit of an example for a brand called Jones Road. They're a beauty brand, they've grown quite quickly, and as you'll see, as I click through here, one of the ways they have grown is through the use of these sorts of quizzes. They ask you what skin type you are, your skin concern, you know, what sort of... level of oiliness you have in your skin, your other tone, your makeup products. And then at the end, they ask you for your email. And so, if you think about how we can provide really good recommendations to customers, yes, past purchase is great data to have, yes, when they're browsed is great to have. But understanding what people are really looking for in terms of problems to solve allows us to give really good recommendation like the ones you can see here. So here you can see Jones Road have tailored the recommendations to the user. And when you look at this brand in particular as a case study, you see that they are really successful with this tactic. 80% of their subscribers have come through quizzes and these quizzes have 16% conversion rate through sale. So incredibly effective. And this matches what we've seen with existing clients. We've seen clients add in these and get up to 10x increase in the amount of leads they capture through their website. Or a 200% increase in revenue from journeys informed by this sort of data, incredibly powerful to use. And in terms of data capture in particular, what we've seen is 45% of signups include some sort of interest data, so really impressive there. Okay so before sale what you've done is you've created your smart segments, you've looked at your automations and you've implemented some sort of progressive profiling. The next step is during the sale. So what are we trying to do here? First we're trying to see the sale of members early. We are looking at how we can add on-channel sequencing to make our campaigns more effective. We look at things like dynamic offers to different customer segments to reduce the amount of margin we're giving away. And we're looking at the use of AI power recommendations and offers to personalize. And we've got some data on how effective those can be. So the first thing is seeding sales of the youth members. Like we've seen, sales get earlier and earlier each year. Black Friday used to be the week of Black Friday, now it's two, three, four weeks out, and this is true of every sale. So instead of following that race, what you can do is just provide some exclusivity. You can do things like what Garnier have done, they've just given out early access to that particular sale to all their existing members. Super easy way to reward members, super simple way to not get caught in the traffic going too early on each sale. Second thing is using it on the channel. Now, if you've been in any sort of master seminar or presentation, I'm sure you've heard us talk about this a ton. There's a reason for doing so. While email is very effective and remains effective, around over 30% of marketers say that email is the most effective channel in terms of ROI. It is and will become more and more difficult to get into people's inboxes with changes from companies like Google, introducing AR summaries and shuttling things to promotions or updates tabs. And so adding an omnichannel and other types of channels is a really good way to overcome this and we've seen adding another channel increases engagement by 24%. So it can make a big difference to add in something like a website, a web channel, a push, some digital ads, some in-apps if you do have an app, or some SMS's for particularly urgent messaging. So to give you like a little flavor of how this might look, we've taken an example from a season, just showed you like an example of what a journey might look like. This isn't exactly what Gibson does, but it is a really good example of one brand is doing well. If you look at Gibson's customer journey, here's what it looks like. Someone signs up on the web channel, we capture all the standard details, and then immediately they get this welcome email. It's triggered immediately. You have some benefits to the program, but you also have an option to complete your profile. So, here, it's like we talked about this Progressive profiling, this is what it looks like for Gibson. So they ask you primary pro post guitar playing, the categories you care about most, the frequency of communication you would like and what you would like to hear about. So it's giving Gibson a really clear idea of who you are, what you're interested in and what sorts of content you might like to see. And what this allows them to do is when they have a product launch like this one, and they send out a particular product. They can tailor it to the person that they think is most interested in this product. And so they send this product launched by email. Another option this gives them is building in some sort of social retargeting. So this can be triggered in Emarsys or engagement cloud immediately after the product launch sends. Again, it allows more channels and more engagement for each particular user. So again, not exactly how they do it, but a really good example of ways that you could do it and you can add channels to existing campaigns really simply. So talks going early, we talk on the channel. Another way to do this is to protect margin by tailoring offers to pass to spend. So something we've seen to be really effective with clients we've worked with is not just giving a flat offer to every single customer, but tailoring those offers based on... Predicted spend that we expect. So for example, if someone's predicted to spend a lot, so you can give them a high offer, medium gets a medium offer, low predicted spend gets a low offer. And we've seen that up to a 5X difference in the average order value between high and low predicted spends. So this really does have a big impact when you implement it. A really simple way to do this is just give some flat deals off, so you can give the high brick to spend 30 off, medium 20 off and low 10 off. This is a great way to start in terms of examples and this does allow you to protect margin from those low predicted to spend customers rather than giving Aaron a flat discount for a low item. While nudging those high predicte to spend people up towards high purchase rates. So the fourth thing to do. Is really look at your customer journey and make sure you're using personalization across it. And not just on your website, as I'm sure a lot of you are doing, but in terms of your life cycle and your ad emails. And so why do we say this? That's because in terms the research that we can see, it makes a big difference in the result at a time. So in this paper here, what this magazine looked at was the impact of personalization of content based on user preferences that they'd be given. There's a lot going on in this chart. What you need to focus on is the two lines at the top there, the light blue and the dark navy dashed. The two at the bottom are control groups, but what they wanted to do is make sure that they were controlling for people's preferences. So they split everyone that had given their preferences into two groups. The light blue line got a personalized e-magazine, and the darker line did not get a personalized e-Magazine despite giving the company their preference. And you can see that at the start, they look pretty similar, but over time, there's a big difference in the click-through rate of the personalized group. And if you sum up those areas on the chart, you see up to two times click-through rate versus the control values, which is a big, big difference. So you might say, okay, that's great, but what happens to purchases when you personalize things? So we can take an example from Wayfair, the United States furniture retailer for this. They wanted to take a look at the impacts of removal of cookies. On user behavior but it also serves as a really interesting study into the effects of personalization. So what they did, they get several million hits per month on their website and they split the traffic into two. In one version they had a personalized homepage, in another version they had a non-personalized homepage. And you can imagine the differences in personalization here. I wasn't able to find a screenshot of a non personalized homepage but you can kind of picture me ahead. What they found was really interesting. They're two big findings. The first one was kind of as predicted. They did see an increase in prices paid and items bought from the personalized homepage. But the more interesting one that we found was they were also 10% less likely to return items if customers had seen a personalized page. What's happening here is not just that we're able to better predict what people are interested in and looking for, but we're also able to better serve people's needs. You know, they're buying things that they're more likely to keep than not feeling the need to return them so much, which, you know, as I'm sure you're all aware, returns erode margins like nothing else. So, we're thinking about personalization, we're think about sales, we're thinking about life cycle. Really whenever we can we should be looking to embed personalization in there and you can do this really simply across email and web channel with things in engagement cloud like the predict recommendeder and things like that. Really important to nail during the sale to maximize not only the revenue from the sale, but also minimize the return rate afterwards. So we're through the sale, we've used Omnichannels, we have put personalized recommendations kind of everywhere we can. We've seeded our sale early and we've use dynamic offers. So what next? Aftersale is really about nailing that post purchase brand messaging and then if we've done all this other stuff we can set up for the world of agentic marketing which is coming but it's not quite here yet but when it does come we want to be able to take advantage of that. First things first, once you've got all these people into your brand, and they've bought for the first time, how do we convert them to a second purchase? This is a template of how this might look, and one we're kind of consistently using to set up this team over time. I think one of the biggest mistakes that brands make is they try and get you to buy the same thing. You buy a jacket, and then a week later, they send you offers on jackets. You've already bought a jacket. You don't need to buy another jacket. You do need to understand why that brand and what the brand stands for, which is why this is a good example. Earlier, a week one post-purchase could look something like this, where they talk about specifically why their brand is different in terms of sustainability, in terms of active levels of ingredients, and in terms recycling. So it just reinforces people's choice about that particular brand. Once you've done that, in waves two and three. Is a good time to expand awareness of what sorts of categories of brand might offer, what sort of product, expand people's idea of what is in there. This is a great example from TripAdvisor. It talks about TripAdvisor rewards, it gives you a list of the features, it does some great call to actions. This is kind of a good next step in terms of post-purchase flow. And then depending on your purchase cycle, it could be anywhere from weeks four to eight, is when you can start recommending some complementary or cross-sell categories. It's a good example from Warby Parker here. They talk about a few different frames. This is the sort of thing that you would put in slightly later and ideally this is informed by the customer understanding that you built early on through the use of progressive profiling. So that's the general template. This will be different for each brand, but it's a good place to start in terms of your thinking out post purchase. The last thing you do is you know, prepping for agentic marketing. And you know this, this is when you go on LinkedIn, everyone's talking about it. But when you look at the data, only 6% of marketers have actually embedded AI in their marketing workflows. So it's not very consistent or common yet. But it will be powerful. And what will make it more powerful is getting the right data to feed it with. So I kind of like to think of these AI agents are very enthusiastic junior store assistants or interns, you know, they're only really as good at the training you give them and the data you supply them with. Because what can happen is if you only feed them purchase history, they can be very limited in their recommendation set. So for example, last week I was in Uniqlo, I bought some grey socks. If a store assistant or an AI agent looked at my purchase history when I came back website they might think okay well maybe he needs more socks. If you're thinking a little more broadly about what a good store assistant does, they ask you, what are you shopping for today? What sorts of things do you like? What's the occasion you need to wear this for? And that broadens out their scope of potential recommendations. And the same is true for any sort of agentic marketing. If we can understand the context in which people are buying, if we can't understand the reasons, if we're gonna understand the constraints, we actually get a lot more effective with our recommendations and so combining those through those things that we've gathered from our progressive profiling means we can do things the goods store assistant does like offer different categories and different brands, you know, like offering me you know sort different shirts that I might want to buy because that's why I'm in store that day. As doing so will mean that when the agenetic marketing comes when you implement it, you will be more effective from the get go. So what have we done? Well, first we looked at two potential scenarios for a sale, right? You've got one scenario where you're often sort of limited segmentation, you don't build customer intelligence, there's no clear post-purchase journey, and that means that over time, you know, you get the same uplift and the same drop. Whereas if we can find a way to build some more sustainable advantage during a sale you know things like targeted offers to preserve margin, rewarding loyalty customers first, building customer intelligence as we go and nailing the post purchase journey. It means that we can see consistent uplifts and more advantage over time. So that looks like the 12 things we talked through. We talked about creating smart segments, doing an automation trigger audit and implementing progressive profiling before our sale. During the sale, we talked about seeing the sale members early. We talked using omnichannels to sync our messaging. Talked about using dynamic offers, and we talked about embedding recommendations wherever we can. Then after the sale, we talked about nailing that post-purchase brand messaging before we push for a cross-sell. And we talked about also how important that all this other stuff is, is setting up for the agentic marketing future where we're headed. I hope that was useful, I hope it helped you think differently about your end of financial year sale. If you do have any questions, feel free to reach out, I'm happy to answer any of them. And hopefully following all these steps means you have one of your best end of financial year sales that you've ever seen.