4th September 2023

Welcome to the Marketing Update

As always, we use this to communicate any national activity we want you to be aware of, any new or exciting news, reminders of important dates etc., examples of best practice and knowledge sharing.

We hope you've all had a good summer - although the weather seems to think summer has just started! We are all back in and firing on all cylinders in the Marketing Dept and looking forward to the rest of the year.

Key Dates

Customer Service Drop In Session - 5th October - 11am - 12pm - this isn't strictly marketing but there is such a link between marketing and customer service/retention, we want to open this webinar up to anyone who wants to attend. It won't have an agenda as such but nearer the time we will see if there are any topics that seem to be recurring to get the ball rolling. We would like to get feedback on CRM Lite and also discuss insights from the recent Customer Survey.

Data Cleanse in Umbraco – Thursday 7^th September - see below.

Marketing Webinar - 11am Wednesday 27th September - topics TBC.

Star Teacher competition announced locally - w/c 2^nd October.

Charity PJ Week – 9^th-15^th October.

Data Cleanse in Umbraco

Thursday 7^th September – all data older than 6 months will be cleansed from Umbraco as part of the regular data cleanse we do for GDPR purposes. It shouldn’t affect many, if any of you but we always like to give some notice so that you can download (and password protect) any form entries that you think you need.

What’s to come in Q4 2023

We have lots of new and exciting things happening in Q4 of this calendar year so we just wanted to let you know what to expect and look forward to!

• Customer survey results and insights – we are just finishing off the document to send round this week, sharing with you all the results and insights from the customer survey we did this summer. We will also share with you the raw data so you can filter by your franchise and see how you compare to the network for various metrics.
• TV – results and next burst – we had hoped to share the results of the burst from earlier this year with you by now but there have been some delays at Sky. We will share as soon as we have them. We are back on air this week for the whole of September.
• Standby Social - we have retained Standby to do two days per month for the next 12 months. Standby are our production partners who we work with on videos and TV ads. This is a product called Standby Social and is focussed on delivering high quality video content for social media in the appropriate formats. We are very excited to get moving on this. We have our planning meeting with Standby tomorrow and have the first filming days booked for Friday 29^th September when we are thrilled to be working again with the gorgeous Lorenzo and his parents, Laurence and Laura, to document his swimming journey into Splashers and the new challenges faced by Mum and Dad now Laura has gone back to work
• Print supplier – we know this one has been a long time coming ‘officially’ but we have worked with almost all of you now in producing print through our new suppliers. The documentation is nearly ready to launch. Definitely by the end of this month.
• Exciting new strategy for boosting our Instagram and TikTok presence; working with an external expert, we are very excited to be focussing on optimising these channels and will share the strategy with you all soon…
• Charity PJ Week – Children’s Hospital Pyjamas are our official national charity partner and we hope as many of you as possible will support them this October. I met in person with them last month and we devised a plan that works around their needs. In September, we will be emailing all our customers asking them to support the charity and our Charity PJ Week by donating pyjamas. A singular, focussed message. In Jan/Feb, we will put a shout out for our customers to help sew From Me To You Hearts if they can. In May, we will put out comms to see if any of our customers can help by becoming a co-ordinator (in the areas they need). Every time we do these comms, our customers and our network go above and beyond and we always get feedback that the charity see an immediate uplift when we support them in this way. I will copy local offices in on all national customer comms.
• First Customer Service Drop-in session – we pushed this into October to allow office team members the chance to get their heads around ASIA. The session on the 5^th will be open to everyone and anyone who wants to attend and we will kick off the session by having a chat about the insights we have gained from the Customer Survey. This will be followed by a chance to ask questions and share best practice.
• Promotional Items – we will be launching a set of standard promotional items with criteria around ordering them (timescales etc.) based on the survey we conducted at the beginning of the summer.
• Website Improvements – we are continually working on the website – some improvements, like the Home Page update, are instantly recognisable but others take place in the background. We have just completed a Page Speed Audit where we have learned that our site is near perfect on desktop and whilst it is still ‘green’ on mobile, we can make some improvements – these centre around new best practices, such as using next gen image formats, so not jpegs and pngs, but webp image formats. We will be doing work to the existing site and then issuing guidelines around any new images that you upload to the site – this is just one of the improvements we are making in the back end to ensure the user experience is at the top of its game.
• Campaign Monitor Guidelines – these are underway and will be issued in the next month or so – again, focussing on the importance of brand consistency across the network.
• Audits at a local level – these have fallen by the wayside over the summer but we will be picking up in earnest and two franchises will be audited across social media, Campaign Monitor and Umbraco each week.
• Swim Academy – we don’t have anything in the calendar yet but we will be working on updating SA collateral, videos/images etc.

As always, we are here to support you in all the usual ways so please get in touch. Schedule in a call with Calvin Marketing for this month - lots of great PR opps coming up with Charity PJ Week and Star Teacher!

A full up-to-date breakdown of NML spend this financial year so far will be published by the end of this month.

MoneySuperMarket Partnership

On the 18th September, we will be going live as a partner on a new initiative by MoneySuperMarket. They are looking to cross/up sell to their customers by offering incentives to buy more than one product through their website e.g. if you already bought home insurance through them, they would also like you to purchase car insurance. For doing so, customers will be thanked with rewards of their choice, a free trial with Puddle Ducks being one of them. This is a pilot for 3 months initially. We don't foresee anything like the volume with ALDI. This will be a slow burn. MoneySuperMarket customers can only buy more products when their current insurances/contracts are up. In the meantime, we get brand awareness and a strong third party link back to our website. We will obviously review as well after the 3 months to see if we want to continue. I will circulate URLs and visuals asap so you can see the customer journey.