Three ways insurers can optimize offline marketing campaigns
Traditional marketing methods are still effective — and sometimes even more effective — than popular digital marketing strategies.
Digital channels such as mobile apps, responsive websites, social media and chatbots have revolutionized the way policyholders interact with insurers.
Yet insurers are finding it difficult to get their message on the right digital channel. There can be so much noise in the digital space, it is likely your target audience isn’t being reached.
This is where offline marketing channels such as direct mail, print media ads, business cards, marketing events, magazine publications and promotional calls can still be effective.
What’s old is new again
Studies increasingly show that “traditional” methods of marketing are still effective — even more so than their digital counterparts in some cases. While data modeling and analytics have significantly improved digital channels in the form of insights, which lead to a better user experience (UX), content mix, branding and conversion rate, there is still a significant need for data-driven off-line customer acquisition processes.
Unlike digital campaigns that target different metrics, for any insurance companies, preparing a mailing list is a complex process on at least three different counts:
- For some lines of business — like auto — a customer already has a policy, and they will not have more than one. Here, customer service equipped with the right consumer insights can play a significant differentiator and may drive customers to switch/upgrade.
- Customers typically change the providers only at the time of renewal. Even then, there generally has to be a significant cost saving to drive purchase.
- The only other trigger for buying insurance is a significant life change that insurers should track and act upon proactively. These events include marriage, divorce, a job move, graduation, and a transfer to a different city.
With the right data, the complexity of targeting and messaging of these acquisition opportunities using “traditional methods” can be efficiently managed. Looking at the three factors mentioned above, it becomes clear that renewal data of existing policies is a significant data point along with the time of renewal and knowledge of customer expectation along with several other variables.
Just like it does in digital marketing strategies, advanced analytics can help you identify the right targets, track leads, and create a post-campaign analysis that will provide sound return on your investment.
Identifying the right targets
Offline marketing and lead generation strategies have evolved alongside analytics-driven digital strategies for customer acquisition. The analytical component is critical for comparing cohorts of customers for responses, identifying the right timing of the messages, and customizing messages. Pulling in data from various sources including individual and household level demographics, property data, summarized credit statistics, and consumers’ behavioral/lifestyle segmentation can lead to better selection of candidates for direct mailing.
To be effective, any modeling exercise should broadly encompass the following three-pronged approach:
- Identify segments of the population that is not likely to respond or the segment more responsive to agent-based sales. This includes criteria-based sorting decided by business rules and other governing factors.
- The next step is the deployment of data-driven, bottom-up strategies like lookalike/response modeling to help identify the population similar in terms of the characteristics to the customer persona of existing customers.
- The final step is to determine the customer reach in terms of geography, time, campaign objective, occupation and other related customer attributes.
Once these steps are complete, an aggregate score is assigned to the entire population, which is then used to generate mailing and calling lists. Additionally, in the case of print and TV ads, these scores can help in identifying regions, time-slots and publications that are more suitable for reaching out to prospects leading to a better response rate.
Capturing the digital trail
While channel attribution works smoothly on digital channels with the help of web analytics tools, offline attribution of incoming leads is trickier.
For instance, a prospect may reach out to the insurer’s website after going through a print ad. Or perhaps, the print ad may act as a trigger for the prospect to ‘like’ the insurer’s social media page followed by a visit to the insurer’s website through a hyperlink on the social media page.
Tracking that digital trail is another process that has evolved with time, and insurers are still figuring out the most effective means of connecting with customers. In both cases, the source of the incoming leads can be attributed to the search engine results and the insurer’s social media page respectively (when they are generated by the print ad).
How to eliminate this attribution challenge? The following are a few strategies that add more visibility to the performance of the offline insurance marketing collateral:
- Incorporate a unique point of contact. For example, a print ad associated can feature a unique touch-point such as a dedicated phone number, e-mail address, and social media handle to segregate the incoming responses/leads.
- Generate a set of coupon codes. Each code should represent a specific print channel, can help in precisely measuring the effectiveness of the targeted publications.
- Mine customer information. If the offline advertisement requires the customer to perform an online activity such as online registration, the insurers can equip their websites with quick survey prompts (with options) asking the customer how they found the website. Likewise, in the case of inbound telephone calls triggered by an offline ad, the customer care executive can put forth the survey to the consumer.
- Create a great landing page. Another great way of attributing leads coming from offline ads (TV or print) is through creating a landing page exclusively for the print ads that trigger an online action. The URL broadcast through the offline ad can be combined with a unique tracking parameter that triggers a beacon to the web analytics software used by the insurer.
Strategy and analysis
Establishing and tracking the key performance indicators (KPI) of an offline insurance campaign allows insurance marketers to track the health of the ongoing effort in real-time. This also helps maintain the required buffer for marketers to tweak the campaign mix if the expected results are not met.
KPIs provide an important analysis of where the leads are coming from to create a more effective digital/offline campaign mix. It can also assist in identifying the cues in each channel that improves response. For example:
- Direct Mail: Eliminate multiple input forms or include prepaid envelopes, brand affiliations, offers, or discounts.
- Phone: May include improvisations such as incorporating emotional intelligence cues in customer service scripts and data-driven triaging of incoming calls based on the capabilities of call centre executives.
- Print: Provide clarity on uncertainties such as effective ad-formats, and customer’s communication preference (which channel they prefer when responding to ads such as phone, website, social media, and chat).
- Direct Response TV: Identify high performing time slots by analyzing the number of viewers and response rate.
Big data grows business
The decreasing attention span for digital campaigns, an accumulation of consumer information, and easy availability of bureau data as well as social media data will surely motivate insurers to mine data for actionable insights that will improve their marketing strategies. By employing data analytics and machine learning, these insights will be especially useful for offline marketing channels that can lead to a more sustained marketing effort while improving the ROI.
Dheeraj Panday (Dheeraj.panday@exlservice.com) is the engagement manager at the operations management and analytics company EXL Service. These opinions are his own.
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