iSelect spells out shift in customer approach for next financial year

iSelect is continuing to transform its relationship to customers and further develop digital marketing through automation and new affiliates to improve personalisation for enhanced customer journeys and ROI.

The ASX-listed marketplace made the comments as part of its full-year results announcement this week. 

 ISelect's underlying revenue (excluding iMoney) was down 16 per cent to $150.7 million, a result it attributed to prioritising profitable revenue and focusing on core business. The company has $22 million in cash and no debt.

ISelect has spent the past 18 months working to transform its back-end systems in order to pivot customer interactions from transactional to relationship-oriented, and is committed to starting the live rollout in the second-half of this financial year. Investments stretch from technology to outcome-based design and innovation and a substantial increase in delivery in the technology release cycle.

 “Our technology initiatives will continue to focus on the core – customers, partners and operations – taking us from a transactional to a relationship business. This will transform the way customers interact with us in the future,” iSelect CEO, Brodie Arnhold, said in a statement.

iSelect is also striving to create a single view of customer, and has a raft of developments in the pipeline to own more household finance management along with improved product recommendations and the ability to cross-sell. The company also wants to enable subscription services, auto-compare features and bill upload and monitoring.

On the marketing side, several new marketing initiatives were detailed, including introducing a lead handling services for B2B clients and further developing white-label solutions for B2B partners to be part of iSelect comparison offering.There are also plans for improved personalisation and marketing automation for enhanced customer journeys and marketing spend ROI, supported by an internal marketing cloud.

“When you look at the pillars of our marketing strategy through our digital efficiency, affiliates, new lead sources, marketing cloud and iSelect brand, in FY20 we intend to build on these foundations and we look forward to seeing continued efficiencies as a result,” Arnhold said in a statement.

On the digital front, iSelect is looking for further digital efficiencies by continuing to optimise and automate its digital marketing investment.

“With strategic marketing investment and focus on ROI underpinning the greater efficiency and EBITDA growth seen in FY19, we will continue this into FY20 while also investing further in our brand,” Arnhold said.

On the financials front, iSelect said a focus on marketing ROI has resulted in EBITDA uplift across the business for the full-year to 30 June 2019. Among these are the health business, which has strategically shifted away from traditional lead sources to a focus on marketing ROI, resulting in an expected decline in revenue, leads, sales units and RPS, and produced an uplift in EBITDA of 7 per cent.

The loss of an affiliate partner and market demand produced a revenue decline in iSelect's energy and telco business. The company's life and general insurance business saw an uplift of 43 per cent in leads thanks to growth in newer general insurance verticals of home and contents, pet and travel insurance. 

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