BNZ discovered that its customers who use mobile payments have a far higher NPS score than those who don’t (53 vs 27). Additionally, mobile payment customers are considered highly active customers for the bank. But of the customers eligible for Google Pay, only 10% had activated it.

The aim was to both drive an increase in Google Pay users and increase their frequency of use, building a stronger and more engaged customer base. This would be done by using use smart data and social proofing to convince BNZ customers that mobile payments were a popular and easy choice, breaking down barriers to adoption and giving consumers a compelling reason to try Google Pay and start building a habit of paying with their phone.

To ensure maximum uptake, BNZ took a three-phase approach.

A social proofing phase used outdoor, social and digital content to show how frequently Google Pay had been used in the past month. Headlines like ‘2976 taxis taken’ and ‘7149 pies eaten’ were attention-grabbing, and ended with the message ‘Everyone’s using Google Pay with BNZ’.

To ensure customers took action, BNZ then split the target audience into two target groups and created separate eDMs with personalised prompts for each audience, addressing the unique barriers they would be facing.

To ensure ongoing use, a cash back incentive was served digitally to eligible customers, along with in a unique eDM to those who had activated Google Pay.

The response was incredible, achieving 10x incremental growth over baseline expectations, over the five week campaign period. And the number of customers using Google Pay 5 times a month had nearly doubled. Through communicating directly with their customers, BNZ were able to get them not only to activate Google Pay, but to establish payment habits that would ensure they remained engaged with BNZ in future.