When it comes to insurance marketing it can be difficult to make your services standout from the competition. With so many companies offering insurance cover in every sector, you could think that undercutting the competition is the only way to gain market share. However, our insurance marketing insights can help marketers from the health, life, vehicle and home insurance sectors improve their marketing strategies or at least find new angles and approaches for their marketing campaigns.
In July 2018 we surveyed over 5,000 people in a national representative sample of the UK public. The goal of this market research was to understand what aspects of an insurance service potential customers would find the most persuasive when deciding who they should sign up with. We asked the question ‘Which of the following would motivate you to sign up for a health/life/vehicle/home insurance company?’ and asked them to choose from a selection of motivations, including: ‘Free gift when you join’, ‘Payment plan options’ and ‘If a financial advisor recommended it’.
Our results showed that the motivations for signing up can vary a lot depending on the type of insurance a company is offering. However, we also found some universal patterns emerge. A ‘Free gift when you join’ was seen as the most persuasive incentive for signing up for insurance in all the sectors we researched. What’s more, we found that the interest in free gifts was apparent in both male and female audiences, with 23% of men surveyed stating they would be motivated by a free gift and 27% of women.
Figure 1 tracks how the interest in the free gift changes with age. The gift was a major motivator for those aged 18-54 for all insurance sectors. However, health life, travel and home insurance companies have a clear correlation between a fall in interest and increasing age; vehicle insurance has more consistent interest regardless of age. Perhaps this is due to the compulsory nature of car insurance, which you can expect would be the type of vehicle insurance that springs to mind first for most people we asked. As people are forced by law to insure their car, they could be more keen to get any fun, free extras that will make the whole experience seem more of a treat than a chore.
Figure 1
These insurance marketing insights show that a free gift really could persuade customers to sign up and potentially increase insurance sales across all the sectors we researched. However, we are yet to understand what type of free gift would encourage the most responses. Luckily, at fastmap we are always looking for new research to carry out. So, if you would like to learn more about your audience, discover what free gift they would prefer, test a creative, complete some concept testing or DRTV creative testing please don’t hesitate to get in touch and we would be happy to help.
This article was written by Declan Spinks, Marketing Executive at fastmap. To find out more about our services visit www.fastmap.com or get in touch with David Cole, Managing Director, fastmap on +44 (0) 20 7242 0702 or david.cole@fastmap.com.
SIGN UP TO OUR NEWSLETTER FOR MORE INSIGHTS AND INFORMATION