RIAS beats crunch with data crunching
Specialist over-50s insurance provider RIAS has overhauled its marketing strategy and hit sales targets despite substantial budget cuts.
Using predictive analytics, the insurer has moved to a multi-channel, segmented contact strategy based on known characteristics, such as a customer needing specialist skiing insurance at a particular time of year.
“The business problem we were trying to resolve was to reduce costs by 40 per cent,” says Frank Abu, modelling and analytics manager at RIAS. “When the recession was really hot, it was essential for the business to reduce costs while keeping stable customer relationships and doing things in a smarter way.”
A complete overhaul of its data-driven marketing approach has seen a predictive analytics system used to model and forecast outcomes from cross-sell and up-sell campaigns. More relevant, timely messaging is now being used to target customers and deliver sustainable return on marketing investment.
“As soon as we had achieved the cost reductions, we realised there was an opportunity for retention, cross-selling and customer segmentation,” says Abu. RIAS has now built a customer value segmentation that indicates what a customer is currently worth to the business and what their lifetime value could be, thereby determining the scope for marketing to that group. “It has revolutionised our business,” he says.
