Car insurers set up speed trap to catch online customers

Dutch insurance company FBTO was founded in 1956 and is part of the financial services company Achmea, the largest insurance group in the Netherlands. It has been using customer insight software from Speed-Trap since 2006 to fine-tune online marketing strategies based upon the motivations and reactions of its site visitors. FBTO now converts hundreds of sales per day online and has been able to grow its proportion of online sales from 40 per cent to 60 per cent – an unusually high figure compared to competitors.

Approximately half of web site visitors every month are new customers, which meant that insight into exactly what drove the new potential customers was vital. Jan de Vries, web analyst at FBTO, says/ “As a company, we know our customers expect the best online experience in shopping and self-service, but we lacked a consistent and sufficiently detailed view of our customer base with which to achieve this.”

He adds: “We had very limited appreciation of how effectively our online marketing activity was attracting new business, and next to no view of our visitors’ use of our website. Our previous web analytics tool was far too inflexible and basic to offer us any deeper information than numbers of visitors and where they were coming from, but this was a dramatically insufficient level of detail to enable us to truly understand our customer base.”

Data captured from the online channel by Speed-Trap is integrated into the CRM system. When car insurance is purchased online, for example, date of birth and postcodes are captured and used as matching points. Holistic data is then used for predictive modelling, such as conversion rates by sector. This allowed us to predict conversion rates for specific customer segments and where necessary, market to boost this rate,” says de Vries.

A/B testing increases conversion
The key insight FBTO needed was into site visitor experience and determine how they reacted to certain marketing campaigns or page layouts, or if there were any areas of the site that were failing. Jeroen Sijbom, business analyst at FBTO, says: “Through understanding exactly how visitors arrive at and move through our site, we are able to ensure that there are no faults with the page downloads that would force our customers away and that our content is as attractive to our visitors as possible.”

From identifying a single fault, FBTO was able to dramatically increase conversion rates for a particular product. Sijbom explains: “We created three different pages for one of our insurance products, each with different details, including a different default quote. We randomly selected which page to present to each customer as they arrived, and measured the interactions with the pages through Speed-Trap. The insight showed which page was the most successful and how we should modify the pre-existing page. This single change has provided us with a 20 per cent increase in the conversion rate for this product.”

This single change increased conversion rate by 20 per cent

Insight into marketing effectiveness allows FBTO to modify marketing and sales strategies and therefore adjust and re-allocate marketing spend accordingly. Changes in marketing strategies or content can be monitored and reported, so that marketing teams can proactively amend campaigns immediately, without having to wait for campaigns to run their course. “Usually, our adword campaigns are our most effective within our marketing armoury. To coincide with a new overall marketing campaign, we changed our adwords and the landing pages these led to,” says de Vries.

With hourly updates from the web intelligence tool, instant reporting showed which adwords were best at driving traffic and conversion. One surprising finding was that affiliate marketing was outperforming a new set of adwords, leading to a reversion to the previous set. “Previously, it would have taken us in excess of three weeks just to identify this problem,” he says.

Still making improvements
FBTO is planning to take this proactively further in the coming months by adding Speed-Trap’s ABI (Audience Behavioural Intelligence) and RTE (Real-Time Engine) to the current analytics. This will allow the marketing teams to build detailed individual profiles on every visitor and then produce targeted content.

De Vries concludes: “Speed-Trap has given us the ability to analyse precisely how our site is performing and how effective each element of our marketing is.

With this insight, we have so far been able to grow our proportion of sales from the online channel from 40 per cent to 60 per cent. With the introduction of detailed individual visitor profiles and a real-time view of customers’ arrivals and journeys through the site, we will be able to produce far more focused site content, determined by the precise details of their relationship with us, which will have a measurable impact on our bottom line.”

FBTO.jpg

Recommended