How can you be sure you’re sending the right offer to the right prospects? Once marketing materials have been created, stakes are high. By implementing effective testing strategies upfront, you can validate a campaign’s success before a major investment is made. 

Testing marketing can pose a challenge to even the largest insurance providers. Many companies simply don’t have the internal resources to define clear parameters before launching a campaign.  

Unsuccessful campaigns can be expensive. It’s estimated that businesses lose billions due to poorly executed marketing. Sending out so-called “bad content” can also hurt a brand’s credibility, further eroding engagement. 

Test Before You Invest: 3 Strategies for Insurance Campaigns  

Take a look at how we test market to help our clients send airtight campaigns:  

1. Use an incubator lab. 

Let’s say an insurance company has a new product or segment they want to expand, but they lack the tools and resources to do it. This is where an incubator lab comes into play. When our insurance clients bring on new products, we help them synthesize data (theirs and ours) to identify the best prospects to test.  

Using us as an incubator lab, an insurance provider doesn’t need to have staff dedicated to testing marketing. Instead, they rely on us to continually optimize.  

Any time one of our clients wants to launch a product, we step in to develop a new creative, take their responder history, and use our 50-plus years of collected data to build a data model. This model is then rigorously tested and refined. From creative to direct mail to follow-up emails to delivering new leads, we take a concept from beginning to end for our clients. 

Relying on an incubator lab can help you to avoid costly failed campaigns. At FM Engage, we stick with the philosophy of using a data-agnostic approach to let the best data model win. This philosophy enables us to find winners fast—even when drawing from vast data sets that include demographics, credit personas, vehicle transactions, insurance purchases, and life stage clusters. 

2. Apply multivariate testing. 

Gone are the days of traditional A/B testing, which often proves slow, limiting, and expensive. Successfully testing marketing now involves advanced multivariates. With multivariate testing, you can test multiple elements and variations simultaneously, rather than just two variants like in A/B. FM Engage’s proven multivariate method is called the FaQtor Test.  

At its core, the FaQtor Test helps reduce redundancy. Using our FaQtor Test, we can concurrently evaluate multiple variables to quickly and accurately pinpoint the optimal combination of creative, offer, and list. Currently, our FaQtor Test remains the most cost-effective and efficient method in the market. It has a track record of busting long-standing controls. 

A multivariate methodology like the FaQtor Test can be a game-changer if your team tends to “stick with what works”—i.e., a formerly successful direct mail or email creative. In-depth testing can create opportunities to update a creative based on what resonates most with a target audience. Many times, this looks like using data to personalize. In recent years, the need for personalization has greatly increased. 

3. Find the winning sequence.  

A customer’s journey is anything but linear. At FM Engage, we’ve found omnichannel, or surround, marketing to be the most effective strategy to get impressions in front of a customer. Omnichannel marketing maximizes campaign performance by touching direct mail recipients with digital impressions before the mail arrives in-home and while in-home. 

All the while, we’re continually testing marketing to narrow down the right sequence.   

The right sequence varies by audience. Some demographics respond better to an email campaign, and these prospects can be segmented upfront. Testing is the tool we use to evaluate the efficacy of different channel sequences and touchpoints in driving desired customer actions. Armed with this data, we can identify the optimal path, or sequence, across multiple channels. 

Our testing leads us to fascinating insights—like highlighting how direct mail can be effortlessly tied to digital campaigns. When we tested using QR codes in direct mail, we found that more than 35 percent of customers engaged.    

Once a successful sequence has been chosen, testing marketing metrics like brand awareness, ad recall, traffic, and conversion rates can measure effectiveness. We recently helped one of our clients, an auto insurance provider, employ a strategy that included direct mail—yielding 20-times the audience growth with close to a 2 percent response rate. Following a demo, our client now sees 20 percent policy acceptance. 

Results like these prove how testing marketing is foundational to strategy. It’s not just icing on the cake. Without rigorous testing, an insurance company risks missed opportunities by launching ineffective marketing that doesn’t connect. 

By testing marketing with methods that work, we at FM Engage ease this burden for our insurance clients. Combining 50 years of proprietary data from our parent company, Franklin Madison, with proven testing strategies ensures we connect our clients with their most promising prospects.  

Ask How We Can Fail-Proof Your Campaign 

If your marketing team doesn’t have the capacity to test, let us take it off your plate. You can keep doing what you do well while we drive results. To test with the best, reach out to FM Engage.