Marketing strategies supported by digital platforms enable Insurance providers to monitor and measure their impact on both prospects and customers. When marketing to existing customers, it’s important to understand how to measure awareness engagement and value, across different customer segments. In Part 1 of our blog series, we focussed on metrics linked to awareness – the volume of available email addresses, deliverability, and open rates. In Part 2, we turn our attention to the next steps in that journey, those that gauge engagement and value with existing customers.

4. Click Through Rate (CTR)

Getting your message delivered to your target audience’s inbox is a great first step. But don’t assume that this means that your message was read, and more importantly that it resonated Whether your goal is to have a broker learn about your new coverage or mitigate a homeowners risk by adding on flood protection, it’s only if and when they actually engage with your content that you will know if that message hit the mark. CTRs can track when customers download your brochure, book a meeting through a calendar app, or click on your call to action (CTA) button to ‘Find out more’. Strong click rates are driven by having the right value proposition for the right audience but can also be impacted by the language used and even the placement of the links or CTAs within your message. Testing variations on all these drivers will enable you to understand what content, message, and layout works best, which may differ based on the audience, line of business, or even coverage.

“There are instances when CTR is not an accurate metric for performance. For example, if you are averaging a 50%+ open rate on your bulletin communication strategy and a less than 10% CR – then your strategy is indicating that it is performing well. This is because bulletins typically do not have a destination point and the primary objective is that it will be read and digested by the reader vs clicking away. If you want to add another KPI to these communications, try adding an in-email poll question, this will help you gauge readership even further” – Jennifer Pugsley, VP, Customer Success

5. Engagement Scoring

Even when a relationship already exists, connecting with that customer for a new quote or coverage doesn’t always happen right away. It often takes a multistep approach including email messages, exposure to value added content on social media, landing pages, or your web-properties before they are ready to engage. When these activities happen across different platforms and over time it’s more challenging to track and measure. Engagement scoring is a way to do just that, resulting in a single number that measures both where, when, and how engages and their overall level of interest. By assigning different values to different interactions, such as a higher one for webinar attendance and a lower one for opening an email, this metric facilitates how engaged your customer is, enabling sales to create prioritized lists and concentrate their efforts on those customers who are more interested and willing to engage directly.

When building scoring strategies to monitor and analyze engagement it’s important to set thresholds and define what true engagement would mean. This will help marketing, sales and the overall business really understand and action good scores vs low scores. If you are starting from scratch start with a simple scorecard and gather data on that model for 120 days before setting KPI’s or expectations.

6. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

With such a focus on driving new business, Insurance providers often overlook a key metric about the current (and projected) value of their existing customers. Customer value is often viewed based on current premium, value per policy, or policyholder in a specific time period. That view is shortsighted as it doesn’t take into account the lifetime of total revenues and the years a customer has been retained. CLV, in its simplest form, is the total value of a customer over all the years they have been with you, minus any costs needed to acquire and continue to maintain their business.
There are a few different ways to arrive at this metric, which can be viewed in detail in a recent article in The Digital Insurer but the most important steps for an Insurance provider is to select a calculation method and start measuring CLV. This will allow you to view your customers and business from a different perspective and find a way to measure both CLV and project incremental value. Create scenarios by increasing retention rate slightly to project potential profit increases; segment customers by monoline, line of business, or type of coverage modifying the average number of transactions to see how that value can grow. Insurance is a customer business, and looking at value beyond a single coverage or transaction needs to be taken into account when measuring both current and future value.

Identifying the key marketing metrics to measure the success of your business and marketing strategy is the first step. Developing a plan to capture, track, and then act on them is often the more challenging second one. It requires a strategic plan and the right technology platforms, plus the knowledge and expertise to make these metrics into value drivers for your specific business.

If you are looking for ways to better measure your customer marketing impact, we are ready to help. Please Contact us for more information.