The Deep Dive: Audience Suppression

April 15, 2021
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Delve Goes Deeper: Insurance Marketing

Discover how implementing Audience Suppression can help generate better business opportunities. 

This is the fourth post in our Insurance Marketing series, sharing tools to help insurance providers identify their most profitable audience segments, increase their marketing ROI, and drive conversion and revenue growth. In our first marketing tactic Deep Dive, we’ll DELVE deeper into the ways Audience Suppression contributes to conversion growth. 

It’s a common customer lament: I keep seeing ads for things I have already purchased. It happens because they were identified by the insurance brand as a potential target for policy product but once converted, the insurance marketer didn’t remove the person from the marketing campaign for that product. Buying ad reach that will never convert is one of the efficiency killers in paid media campaigns.

For the insurance marketer, Audience Suppression is truly the low-hanging fruit of marketing efficiency. It involves filtering data and using it to thoughtfully create target audience segments for your ad campaigns. 

In the case of Audience Suppression, this often starts by identifying those customers who have already made a purchase as well as existing customers who may be unprofitable.

Once this segmentation is complete, you simply suppress those segments thereby excluding them from future campaigns. In some cases, an Audience Suppression strategy involves shifting existing customers to different retargeting campaigns—advertising complementary products or services they’ve already purchased to generate cross-sell revenue. This saves ad budget and also creates happier and more loyal customers since you’re not annoying them with ads for products they have already purchased.

“Audience definition depends on each marketing channel and can involve different types of actionable factors such as demographics, psychographics, zip codes, latitude/longitude, and behavioral attributes,” adds Svet Filipson, Head of Analytics at DELVE.

Audience Suppression requires access to reliable data and analytics. Marketers who want to employ the technique for email marketing, for instance, would need to compare their email marketing database with their CRM customer database as well as any affinity databases. That data must be aggregated to create a single view of the customer based on who the insurance carrier is trying to reach.

This is why data accuracy is important and why you need to continually update your audience segments. Marketers must constantly be moving prospects and customers on and off of suppression lists, making changes based on up-to-date activity and interests. 

When done correctly, a customer who opts out of an email about homeowner’s insurance will never receive a display ad that features an invitation for a rate quote on a home owner’s policy. It may seem obvious, but this simple example demonstrates how easy it is to mis-categorize a prospect if you’re not using your data.

This is important not just to eliminate friction with prospects and customers, but also to improve your marketing/media budget efficiency. Reaching audiences that aren’t going to convert costs money and hurts conversion rate metrics.

In our next article in this series, we’ll turn to our next marketing tactic: Conversion Probability.


Ready to take your ads, and your business, to the next level? Get in touch with the DELVE team today.