Delve Goes Deeper: Insurance Marketing
Learn how to leverage customer behavior marketing strategies that enhance ROAS, CPA and ROI across mediums.
This is the first 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.
“Marketing organizations are ill-prepared for COVID-19’s impact on the global economy and consumer sentiment, and this crisis will only exacerbate the budget strain we saw developing in 2019,” says Ewan McIntyre, Vice President Analyst, Gartner for Marketers. “We expect COVID-19 will mark the inflection point in which marketing budgets begin to significantly decline. It is critical that marketing leaders take action now to help mitigate the inevitable risks to those budgets.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has altered buyer behavior as consumers have migrated to digital purchasechannels. Insurance providers that want to survive this latest bout of industry disruption must prioritize digitalbusiness transformation to remain competitive and grow. A key component of that transformation mustinclude applying data insights to drive marketing efficiency gains in ROAS, CPL and overall ROI.
Indeed, in this new world where insurance marketers are being asked to do more with less, it’s imperative to search for ways to efficiently attract more customers, increase purchases and renewals, and cross-sell additional insurance products. Figuring out how to do that will require collecting, integrating and applying first party data sources to make smarter decisions with the marketing resources that they have.
Why Address this Now?
The answer is threefold.
1. As a result of COVID-19, historical behavior data may be unreliable for future marketing planning and this means that insurance marketers must double down on a data-driven approach to ad targeting, delivery and optimization to deliver against ROAS and CPL goals.
McKinsey & Company notes that “Marketers will need to think through how to manage today’s new wave of data and how to use it to better personalize offers and messages to ever-narrower customer segments. Analytics will need to play a core role not only in tracking consumer preferences and behaviors at increasingly granular levels, but also in enabling rapid response be rapidly “trained” on how to best use new behavioral data.”
2. Despite insurance customers craving multi-channel interaction and personalized experiences, sadly, 44% of insurance customers have had no interactions with their insurers during the prior 18 months, according to a survey by EY Global.
To that point, in its 2019 Global FS Consumer Insurance Study of 47,000 insurance and banking customers in 28 global markets, Accenture discovered that more than 80 percent of consumers are willing to share personal data in exchange for benefits such as more competitive prices, faster/easier services, priority service, and more relevant advice for their personal circumstances. The study also affirmed that consumers want tailored, customized offers from their insurers. The implications for insurance marketers seeking to improve their marketing efficiency is clear: apply data to orchestrate personalized offer sequences to customer segments for higher conversion and revenue growth.
3. Insurance marketers that leverage first-party data insights to refine segmentation, targeting, and creative to life events are positioned to outperform their peers.
How so? A 2015 study of 1,700 middle market buyers and non-buyers of life insurance by Deloitte revealed that insurance carriers that are first-movers to disrupt the current (flawed) sales and marketing approach will likely experience the most significant benefits and that a data-driven approach can guide the shift. Deloitte notes that “Generating awareness for life insurance ownership is fundamental to driving increased life insurance sales. More importantly, however, is the need to generate awareness at the moment when the need for life insurance is greatest. Our study confirmed that certain life events are reliable predictors of the likelihood to purchase life insurance. Specifically, individuals who got married, had a child, became a homeowner, or retired were more likely to have purchased life insurance relative to the average person. What is key, however, is identifying those consumers and reaching them at the right time with the right messaging and information and placing emphasis on the life events with higher potential to draw consumers.”
Deloitte further recommends that insurance marketers “overhaul their existing consumer identification and engagement strategies to:
• Generate significant consumer data to identify and proactively predict life events, and
• Develop robust predictive analytics capabilities to identify timing of life events and moments within events that matter most.”
While insurance marketers may find themselves focusing on protecting short-term policy renewals, they may be overlooking opportunities to unlock both short-term and long-term revenue growth while improving customer experience. Insurancemarketers need to “buy smart, not more” in their digital ad campaigns and personalize messaging at scale to align to the unique needs of their various policyholder segments.
The playing field is wide open for the insurance carrier(s) that get this right.
In our next article in this series, we’ll explore how insurance marketers can drive profitability through data-driven optimization.
Ready to take your ads, and your business, to the next level? Get in touch with the DELVE team today.