Doubling online usage at NAB
The brief at National Australia Bank (NAB) was deceptively simple. Its online (Direct Banking) division required a usage growth strategy for www.nab.com.au to be delivered within three months.
NAB is Australia’s fourth largest bank. Its parent, NAB Group, owns several other iconic brands, such as MLC, UBank, BNZ (NZ), Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banks (UK), Great Western Bank (USA) and so on. Large corporations tend to be bureaucratic and banks tend to be conservative and risk-averse. Could usage be improved?
Our approach was to begin with an online audit and compare it with the desired objectives, broken down into the product families. This identified some gaps, which required diverse approaches — organisational change, additional content, link building, coding changes and so on.
The recommended strategy is confidential, but it aimed for an improvement of 10% usage growth 12 months after implementation, which began in August 2010. Implementation involved training several teams to perform their tasks in a more search-engine-aware manner without losing usability. TrainSEM was retained full-time during the nine-month-long implementation phase.
The outcome was beyond all expectations. The 10% improvement came within weeks and search engine traffic doubled at the 8-month mark and continues to improve month after month. Specific conversion targets and customer satisfaction levels have also improved beyond expectations.
This improvement would not have been possible without the vision and support of NAB senior management and the enthusiastic contribution of staff.