• by Ray Schultz , April 25, 2018

Many variables may be involved in personalizing an insurance offer. But vehicle models are especially potent in generating insurance quotes, Liberty Mutual Insurance found in email tests with its OEM partners.

“People really, really love their cars,” said Katy Fitzpatrick, program manger of Liberty Mutual Insurance, speaking on Tuesday at MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit.

Granted, it took awhile for the idea to germinate. Only a few years ago, creative focused heavily on the Liberty Mutual brand.

In 2016, the insurance provider had see a 48% rise in click-to-open rates with versioned creative and brand colors featuring the Chrysler, Dodge and Fiat brands.

The problem with working with OEMs is that “no two are exactly alike,” Fitzpatrick said. But the firm could see that personalized emails based on vehicle models would work better than a one-size-fits-all approach.

Last September, it conducted an old-fashioned test, running its branded creative for Hyundai and Kia against its control. It was already pulling in the first line and model into the subject line, and the results were “pretty solid” — there was a 15% lift in open rates, although the downstream metrics such as clicks and control start rates were flat compared to the control, Fitzpatrick said. 

It then tested 250,000 for each brand, pulling in images dynamically when the email was ready to go, focusing on the most popular four models for Hyundai and the six big models for Kia. 

The result was a “huge landslide win for the tests,” Fitzpatrick said.

With Hyundai, quote starts hit 70%, a 42% increase --“a huge lift for us,” Fitzpatrick noted. And it saw a 73% rise in the other main metric — the quote complete rate.

The Kia results were similar. Liberty Mutual saw a 79% lift in quote starts, and 69% rise in quote complete rates — both were above 90%. “We knew were own to something,” Fitzpatrick said. 

However, “we wanted to make sure we weren’t crazy,” Fitzpatrick added. So it ran tests with three other OEMs, and achieved a 12% increase in click-to-open rates for Nissan, Affinity and Volvo, although the results were not quite as big a landslide as they were in the earlier test. 

She added that the numbers are growing. And there is a lot at stake when swapping out an image that can produce 500 or 600 policies. 

Liberty sends roughly 60 million emails a year, producing an open rate that hovers around 23.3% and a click-through of roughly 1%. It gets monthly customer data from partners on a monthly basis, including such data points as names, addresses, email addresses and marital status.  

“Sometimes the quality is not the best, but I would say for the most part it’s pretty legit, and we see pretty great results,” Fitzpatrick said.