A Perfect Match: CDPs and the Insurance Sector

Post author:Daniel Meyer
Post published:August 3, 2023
Post category:AdTech

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August 3, 2023

A Perfect Match: CDPs and the Insurance Sector

by Daniel Meyer

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Key points summary

Daniel Meyer unpicks the possible application of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) in the insurance sector, and what benefits Teavaro can bring to the sector...

The data handling challenges of the GDPR provide a real opportunity for data-driven marketing in the insurance sector.
Retail and media have been initially more responsive to the solutions for personalisation and identity handling offered by Customer Data Platforms (CDPs).
The insurance industry has been slow in responding and somehow more wedded to legacy infrastructure and disjointed data analytics.

However, this sector is quickly catching up in the matter of taking the opportunity to use data to prevent and mitigate risk, rather than only for their traditional role of compensating financial loss. The time is now ripe for insurers to realise the potential of Customer Data Platforms, and Teavaro is helping the insurance industry capture the benefits.

Marketing and sales funnels in the insurance sector are a multi-channel combination of online and offline channels.

The number of digital channels and touchpoints is growing fast, as self-service customer portals and apps are being introduced to digitise the insurance sector. For example, most major insurers have expanded into the app market, with insurance companies offering multiple apps for each category including content, service and other functionalities. The creation of these touchpoints and the inclusion into the digital landscape of the insurer is an important step in developing functioning marketing and self-service customer engagement. It seems an obvious step for the growing market of the more digital and self-service-oriented target groups.

Nevertheless, the major part of the acquisitions, renewals, cross- and upsell use cases that these digital channels focus on remains in offline channels such as local sales staff or independent insurance brokers. Although sales numbers have been slowly declining over the past few years, over 50% of insurance acquisition sales – as well as cross and upsell to existing customers – are still realised by local sales staff in an offline environment. Taking these two factors into account there is a strong need for a marketing and sales solution that enables both the offline and the online channel holistically.

The introduction of Customer Data Platforms in the insurance marketing

The combination of this growing digital landscape and the personal contact through sales staff is generating a vast amount of usable data for marketing which remains untapped as long as data is either stored in several different siloes or not saved at all. To give an example, let’s look at a typical customer story using Teavaro’s enhanced CDP. A customer who has an existing policy for house insurance is looking for car insurance quotes on the insurer’s website. As he has logged into his self-service profile on the website in earlier sessions (perhaps to check his existing policy details or renewal date), the insurer’s digital marketing team is able to re-identify him as a customer through Teavaro’s 1st Party Identity solution even though he is not logged in during his current session. Assuming that the necessary permissions have been given (stored as they would be in the same profile), the information that he could be interested in car insurance can now be added to his marketing profile.

In the simplest terms, combining the information that he is already a customer and he is interested in car insurance, marketers have sufficient data to make a decision on the next steps for online and offline marketing and sales actions to engage this individual. Not only can they be addressed with a special combination offer for his home insurance with a new car insurance policy – via a display ad or push notification on whichever device or channel – the local sales representative could also receive a notification that one of their clients has interest in car insurance, giving access to real-time customer intent when it matters most. This is just one simple example which shows how insurers could leverage on this wealth of data through a CDP which includes a digital identification solution, to allow assured cross-channel and device engagements, and an integrated consent management solution – compliant with GDPR guidelines – to ensure that those engagements are permitted and valued by the customer.

CDPs are perfectly suited to assist the sector’s movement away from siloed CRM data across their multiple products.

As a bonus, the nature of CDP integration means that very little has to change within the current marketing stack for this deployment to be effective (and thus the improvement can be deployed swiftly). Even if data lakes have been used by the insurer, the CDP will provide more useful data activation by enabling improved integration of those systems across new and legacy marketing infrastructure. Solutions such as Teavaro’s FunnelConnect create a golden record for each identified customer by combining the online data generated during the digital customer journey with existing offline data, providing a meaningful, real-time 360° view of customer intent and activity. Why 360°? Data attribution compliments data activation, bringing data back into the record, not only from the insurer’s own channels, but their marketing activities elsewhere, in the likes of Google and Facebook. Not only does the CDP unify and activate the insurer’s extensive existing data, but it builds that information exponentially, allowing marketers to improve efficiency across the customer lifecycle and the use cases it brings.

This article was written for Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Our mission is to truly connect people, brands and media

We believe a true connection is built on explicit consent and grows over time as it offers unique value to all. The resulting relationships will be the foundation for scalable people-based marketing by tailoring content and interactions to individual people, not segments. This makes two-way communication possible.

About the author:

Daniel Meyer

Head of Customer Success

Expert in Identity Resolution and Head of Customer Success since 2022 in Teavaro group.

He has strong experience in lead consultant paid media solutions

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What Will the World Look Like Without Third-Party Cookies?

Post author:Dirk Rohweder
Post published:August 3, 2023
Post category:AdTech

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August 3, 2023

What Will the World Look Like Without Third-Party Cookies?

by Dirk Rohweder

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Key points summary

The term Cookieless Future does not describe a future completely without cookies, but simply the elimination of 3rd party cookies.
Even without 3rd party cookies you have the possibility to create individual customer offers with an identity graph in cooperation with a good customer platform (CDP).
The elimination of tracking cookies will not make advertising easier - but it will make the use of customer data more transparent. This can be a key to increasing customer trust in your website.

Third-party cookies are every advertiser’s favourite and a popular tool when it comes to tracking a person’s movements on the Internet. However, they have long annoyed privacy advocates. For this reason, the requirements for the use of data protection-compliant cookies are constantly increasing: just the number of necessary consents from the user is already slowing down some sites and worsening their performance.

This is a problem that will soon (partly) be a thing of the past, because what some browsers like Safari or Firefox have done, Google will emulate. The software giant’s browser will soon stop supporting third-party cookies. As Google Chrome is still the most widely used browser in Spain, this will have a significant impact on the online marketing landscape.

In the following article, we show you what the removal of third-party cookies really means for you and how you can offset the loss of this marketing tool.

What are cookies and why is there talk of “A world without cookies”?

When we talk about cookies in relation to the Internet, of course, we don’t mean actual biscuits. In their purest form, cookies are small data cards that are stored on the user’s computer by a specific website. Through this, the website operator can store different data and information. The user of this website must accept the storage of the cookies; only then is data collection permitted.

Cookies that are placed by the website itself and only store your behaviour during this session on the page are called first-party cookies. These will continue to exist. The cookies that will disappear from the network in the near future are the so-called third-party cookies. These are cookies from a third party that interacts with your page. For example, there is the option to place a Facebook pixel on your page, through which Facebook has the opportunity to store data from your visitors.

What are third-party cookies? Third-party cookies are the cookies that are heavily criticised by privacy advocates. They make the user transparent and ensure that, ultimately, every step of a person on the network can be traced. This, in turn, is a dream for advertisers. Because they can read a person’s interests, preferences, and search intentions just from their complete online profile.

As online marketing has primarily been based on these cookies in the past few years, many experts speak of a world without cookies. This is not entirely true, because first-party cookies will continue to exist, and can become a powerful tool to replace third-party cookies.

What is the difference between First and Third-Party Cookies?

As I mentioned, first-party cookies are created and filled with data on your own site. Things stored include products the customer has added to the shopping cart, or product pages the customer has visited. This information is only available to you and is used, for example, so that a customer who has prematurely abandoned a session, upon returning to your page, will still find the same products in their shopping cart.

Third-party cookies are provided by third parties like Facebook, Google or similar companies, and are primarily used for advertisers. Some even sell the data obtained here. The fact that the customer can be completely tracked through third-party cookies is a problem for privacy advocates, as well as the fact that companies like Google or Meta are anything but transparent in the way they use the obtained data.

This is why Third-Party Cookies were an important tool for marketing

Third-party cookies offered the opportunity to launch individualised advertising. You could personalise offers for a visitor to your page, even if this user had spent very little time on your page. For the background information, data stored in third-party cookies were analysed, showing what else your potential customer was doing on the Internet.

Therefore, you had the opportunity to offer products quickly and without complications to people who came to your page, which corresponded exactly to their previous searches. If you had created and used an identity chart of your customers, you could easily compare the data stored here with the data from third-party cookies, and finally obtain all the relevant information for a successful advertising campaign.

Third-Party Cookies weren’t always the last word in wisdom

Third-party cookies cannot be assigned to specific people, but only to devices at the beginning. Therefore, if someone browses on a mobile phone and visits pages completely different from the ones they visit on their personal computer or laptop, the advertisements shown on different pages on the mobile phone will be different from those on the laptop.

In the past, it was difficult to link the information from cookies from different devices. This is one of the reasons why many experts today say that third-party cookies were a good tool, but they did not take over advertising for you. In fact, even in a world without cookies, if you will, there are excellent opportunities for advertising and individualised communication with customers. You just have to obtain the data in another way, and the customer really has to give it to you voluntarily.

Can you obtain the most important information about your customers without Third-Party Cookies?

One of the most important factors significantly hindered by the removal of third-party cookies is active retargeting. With retargeting, we refer to a marketing strategy that aims to convert so-called “warm leads”. Warm leads are people who have been on your website or online store and left it without performing the desired action.

The intention of most e-commerce sites, for example, is to encourage people to make a purchase on their site. If a user has been browsing your site without buying anything, that’s initially a warm lead. With retargeting, you can increase the customer’s interest in a purchase before the contact cools down and the customer forgets about you.

For this, very specific advertising offers are used in retargeting, which are presented to the user on social networks like Facebook, YouTube or Instagram or in advertising banners on Google or other Internet sites. This connection and, therefore, the advertising approach aimed at these customers on other sites or on social networks is no longer possible without third-party cookies.

What are First-Party Cookies?

This is where your first-party cookies come into play.

First-party cookies offer you the opportunity to store the behaviour of visitors to your page on your own website and thus obtain valuable information. However, this data alone is usually not enough to create really interesting and attractive individualised offers for customers.

For many providers, there is a very simple way to directly and voluntarily obtain from the customer the data that in the past was laboriously collected and analysed through third-party cookies.

This can be, for example, through questionnaires. Of course, a real added value must be offered to the potential customer. If, for example, you offer hair care products, you can ask the potential customer several questions about their hair and shopping habits.

As a “reward” for answering the questions, you can offer the customer a deal that fits exactly their needs and expectations. The advantage: if a customer has once stored this data with you and has agreed to the storage of their data in the context of using first-party cookies, you can use it over and over again to send them individualised information.

Good customer relationship management (CRM) is the key to the problem

A CRM is a database where you can store all the data from your own website or external actions with users and then compare them. For this to work well, you first need to be able to identify your visitors. The best way to do this is through registrations and logins. Because when a customer creates a profile in your store and connects here, you have completely different comparison data.

In this case, on one hand, you can access information from your own database. On the other hand, you have the possibility to identify users and reveal their usage behaviour through the use of a large customer data platform (CDP). For this to work, ideally, you should encourage your visitors in the first step to create a user account with you. You can achieve this in several ways. For example, through:

Granting a membership bonus
Free shipping for members
Special discounts and loyalty offers
The possibility to return disliked products for free
Providing special content only for members
Invitations to members' events
Birthday gifts for members

By building your own identity graph, you can receive support from experts like Teavaro. In this way, you ensure that you really have all the data you need from your customers in the end.

So, what will a world without third-party cookies look like?

Building an identity graph was already an important element in order to really use third-party cookies. Now it becomes the only reasonable option to collect and process the most important information about your potential customers. Since tracking cookies, as this variant of the “little data cookies” was also often called, will no longer be available, you will need your own well-established user database to use for online marketing and retargeting.

This also offers you the opportunity to optimize your retargeting very specifically. For example, you can exclude from the retargeting program customers who have already placed an order with you and therefore already have the status of actual customers. In this way, you focus on the users who you have not yet managed to completely convince of your brand or products.

Customer experience should be the central focus

To convince your visitors and effectively increase your conversion rate, even without the support of third-party cookies in your marketing, you can examine your website and your online store in the framework of a possible conversion rate optimization (CRO) for possible improvements. This includes factors such as the readability and search engine optimization of your product texts and your landing pages.

But also the performance of your page itself and the duration of the loading time of your page or the subpages of individual products. What is the search experience of visitors on your page and how good are the representations of your products? Do product images directly appeal to your customers or were they done in a hurry? A good product presentation should leave no question unanswered for your potential customer.

Marketing without third-party cookies will not be easier, but it will be more transparent

Of course, we must acknowledge that third-party cookies have significantly facilitated the lives of advertisers. However, although targeted and personalised advertising will not be easier with the elimination of tracking cookies. The use of data and, above all, the exact amount of data that is available to you and the advertising platforms with which you work, are more transparent for the customer.

This generates more trust. It’s not uncommon to hear from users that the deluge of cookies on the internet scares many consumers. The fact that one still sees advertising banners from companies whose pages were once visited, even days later, also does not inspire much trust.

The elimination of third-party cookies can therefore strengthen the trust of many users again. If you take the opportunity to further improve the customer experience of visitors to your page, the disappearance of third-party cookies can be a real opportunity for you to gain a small advantage in terms of individual customer focus in combination with optimizations on your page, ahead of your competition.

Our mission is to truly connect people, brands and media

About the author:

Dirk Rohweder

CEO & Co-Founder

Dirk has over 30 years of experience in management positions in IT, telecommunications, consumer goods and consulting, including as CIO of the Paulaner Brewery Group and T-Mobile (UK and Germany).

Since 2012 he has focused on customer data as a strategic asset and basis for omnichannel marketing, data-driven business models, data protection and marketing consent (GDPR).

Recommendations

We believe that a true connection is built on explicit consent and grows over time as it provides unique value to all parties involved.

Today we are looking into the challenge of creating the single customer view and how this challenge is linked to identity resolution.

(more…)