haven life ctv
Tapping Connected TV to drive unprecedented growth for the leading DTC life insurance brand
- Media Buying + Planning
- Growth Consulting
Haven Life offers people an easy way to purchase a dependable and affordable term life insurance policy online to help financially protect the people they love.
But as budgets tightened for consumers facing unprecedented inflation, layoffs, and uncertainty more than a year into the pandemic, how could Haven Life continue to grow their customer base?
As people weathered Covid-19 at home, they turned to screens to help stave off boredom, find an entertaining escape, and to maintain connections with friends and family. In the US alone, streaming service subscriptions rose by 32% last year (to 308.6 million), and 80% of households now have at least one connected device, like a smart TV, Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Fire Stick, Apple TV, or a gaming console.
With this massive shift in consumer behavior, Dragon360 knew that adding Connected TV into Haven Life’s advertising tool kit would enable the brand to further meet people where they are, and create demand crucial for sustained success. CTV would be an integrative expansion of Haven Life’s marketing mix, not a channel working in isolation.
A modern life insurance agency requires a modern approach to their digital advertising. To generate demand to boost new account creations and application submissions, we wove together first- and third-party data with Connected TV (CTV), automatic content recognition (ACR) and programmatic banners. Retargeting and landing page testing and refinement would capture and nurture prospects through to becoming a new Haven Life customer. Throughout, we crafted messaging that resonated most with target audiences, focused on their concerns, goals, and pain-points around their ultimate goals: taking care of loved ones and their financial futures.
We began by segmenting Haven Life’s personas into key audiences formed around major events known to spur life insurance exploration: New Homeowners, New Parents, and Aspirational Millennials who were getting their financial lives in order.
Additionally, we made the most of Haven Life’s first-party data by creating lookalike audiences of current customers tailored to key journey stages and behaviors, and an automatic content recognition audience made up of linear TV viewers who had been served key competitors’ traditional broadcast ads.
Our goal was to test and validate Haven Life’s audience targeting, and hone in on exactly who was most interested in life insurance and likely to follow through with their simple application process.
A few months of testing revealed that new homeowners lagged significantly behind the other audiences, so ad spend was shifted away from that segment, and instead added to the better-performing ACR and Aspirational Millennial audiences. Ad and landing page creative was also optimized for the more responsive audiences once we were able to zero-in on the most successful segments.
We knew it would take multiple engagements to move a potential customer up the hill of deciding to apply and then successfully completing the enrollment process. So, we developed an end-to-end campaign for each audience segment with elements for each of the major points of their buyer journey: a stepping-stone-like flow all the way from brand awareness to the application, medical exam (if necessary) and, finally, successfully securing a life insurance policy.
Creating a demand generation and nurturing approach across multiple mediums, devices, and channels meant that we could meet people where they were in the most relevant and timely way.
Site visitors and all audience segments (except the lookalike audience and those who had already begun an application) were served :15 and :30 spots on CTV across channels like Pluto, Tubi, Sling, fuboTV, and DirecTV Stream. Once they’d watched the video, they would be retargeted with banners encouraging them to use the simple calculator to estimate their policy rate. If the person requested a quick quote or created an account, they’d be l retargeted to complete the process. If not, they’d go back into the CTV targeting pool.
Now that they’d gotten a quick quote, we served them with Apply retargeting banners that encouraged them to complete the easy application process. If no application was submitted, they’d revert back to the site visitors segment, but if they began the application or submitted their application, then they progressed to the nurturing stage.
Nurturing campaigns were broken out into two, depending on the stage the customer was in: whether they needed to finish their application, or if they’d already filled out the application form and were approved, but needed to get a quick medical exam to be eligible for the cheapest monthly rates.
For each call-to-action, we developed retargeting banners and a core landing page to either wrap up application submission or schedule an easy at-home medical exam to complete the eligibility process.
Bifurcating the campaign and optimizing spend allocation to only the best-performing audiences and creative meant we were able to keep the average cost per acquisition well below target CPAs for its duration, driving a considerable return for Haven Life.
Landing pages played a huge part in nurturing campaigns, and were continuously tested for copy, layout, and design optimizations to increase conversion rates.
We developed several different creative concepts for each call-to-action based on the target audience personas, and ran A/B tests to confirm which iteration was the most effective and which should be sunset. We also used heatmaps and session recordings to monitor on-page activity, and moved, added, or eliminated elements based on user behavior.
For example, we found that users were trying to scroll to find more information after they’d reached the bottom of the original page, or that some hesitated and bounced from the page after interacting with a few elements, but not clicking on the CTA. This prompted us to include more information by linking to a key informative blog if they weren’t quite ready, or needed more insight into the application process.
Scheduling a medical exam, no matter how quick and convenient, can feel like a chore. We focused on testing imagery and messaging aimed at easing reluctance and creating a more stress-free experience. We also found that using a progress bar was highly effective, visualizing where users were in the process and illustrating the nearness of the promise of coverage. We also removed an extension barrier on mobile by moving the CTA button, which seemed to be just out of reach in the original iteration.
Haven Life’s first foray into CTV helped deliver the life insurance company’s most successful year to date, and provided a halo effect over all of their other marketing efforts. Systematically growing demand, capturing it, and nurturing through to a successful new customer conversion not only drove record-low cost per acquisition, but significantly increased new policies and the annually recurring revenue that compounds with each new enrollee. Just another example of how Dragon360 has been helping Haven Life grow since we helped launch the brand years ago.
