What’s The Best Way To Nurture Leads? [With Case Study]
This study was originally published by WebEngage.
Lead Nurturing
To put it simply, lead nurturing for insurance companies means devoting time to build meaningful relationships with each prospect. However, building relationships and fostering loyalty is tough for companies, especially if you have thousands of customers. This is where the marketers or businesses as a whole need to move about carefully.
We will run through the entire systematic lead nurturing process with the help of a case study featuring Edelweiss Tokio Life. In this case study, you’ll learn how Edelweiss Tokio Life overcame the most neck-breaking challenges that exist in the digital BFSI world.
About Edelweiss Tokio Life
Edelweiss Tokio Life is a new generation life insurer with presence in 93 cities through its 121 branches. Established in 2011, Edelweiss Tokio Life is a joint venture between Edelweiss Financial Services, a diversified financial services company, and Tokio Marine Holdings, a global insurance giant.
With a strong focus on customer centricity, the insurer is known for its award-winning and innovative products and services. Its strong lineage equips them with the expertise to address the customers’ needs. Headquartered in Mumbai, the insurer serves over 2 lakh customers (as on March 2019) through its multi-channel business.
The Objective
Customer loyalty is undoubtedly crucial for Edelweiss Tokio Life to building sustainable long-term growth. In a mere span of 8 years, they have achieved a persistency ratio of 88.9% and their endeavor is to scale it up even further by this financial year.
To achieve such success, Edelweiss Tokio Life focuses not just on sales — but also on acquiring quality customers and giving them the right experience throughout their journey.
Shown below is the basic journey every new customer follows at Edelweiss Tokio Life.
Attract (New lead) → Interact → Qualify → Nurture → Close → Feedback
The team at Edelweiss Tokio Life proactively finds ways to make their customer’s journey interactive and simple at every touchpoint.
Out of all the stages mentioned above, lead nurturing plays a pivotal role in creating a seamless customer experience.
The Challenge with Lead Nurturing
Edelweiss Tokio Life faced the following challenges to set-up a lead nurturing process, which was as interactive and meaningful as the rest of the customer’s journey:
- Communicating successfully with the customer in the digital age, primarily via mobile
- Leveraging customer data and insights to map complete customer lifecycle
- Qualifying and segmenting prospects to nurture them with content specific to their needs, and;
- Keeping costs down while increasing efficiencies throughout their customer lifecycle
The Solution
To successfully nurture each lead, WebEngage equipped Edelweiss Tokio Life with the right technology support at every step of their lead nurturing process.
Basis the flow represented above, here’s the detailed explanation for the same.
➜ Customer requests for online support via various touchpoints ➜ Basis which Edelweiss Tokio’s Life’s Customer Relation Management (CRM) or precisely their Lead Management System (LMS), assigns a disposition status to the customer
In the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) industry, this step is denoted as ‘customer disposition’ and varies from customer-to-customer.
At Edelweiss Tokio Life, there are close to 30–35 dispositions, based on the initial interactions with the customer.
➜ Based on their disposition status, the customer enters an appropriate segment on WebEngage
The dispositions are grouped under 10 broader segments on WebEngage. Some of these segments include:
- Non-contactable: Customers who are now unreachable due to some reason
- Follow-up: Customers with whom further discussions are required
- Call-back: Customers are interested but want more details at a suitable time and so on
- Nurtured: The customer is on board and knows enough about the brand to make an informed choice
➜ Each segment refers to a unique journey on WebEngage
To accurately follow up with its vast database, the team at Edelweiss Tokio Life creates journeys for each user segment. Different scenarios are then visually mapped, and real-time communication is triggered using WebEngage’s Journey Designer.
These user journeys form a crucial part of the lead nurturing strategy.
➜ Zooming Into Edelweiss Tokio Life’s Lead Nurturing Journeys
Edelweiss Tokio Life’s drip marketing campaign for lead nurturing is spread over a total of 90 days from the first interaction. The drips are further divided into 3 phases depending on the maturity and interaction level of the user.
To help you understand these journeys better, we have highlighted some of the vital features below:
1. Segmentation
In theory, segmentation is the process of breaking down your user base or market into small groups. This is done to understand them better and create specific marketing strategies to engage with them and drive conversions.There are several ways in which marketers can segment their user base, location, purchase history, lifecycle stage, etc.
The pool of customers is segmented into smaller groups, based on their disposition status. Each segment has a unique journey to ensure each lead is covered and nurtured appropriately from the beginning. Additionally, Edelweiss Tokio Life puts adequate segment checks throughout the lead nurturing journey.
These regular checks guarantee:
- Each journey remains valid for a particular segment only
- Each customer is guided along a unique path, based on their actions and reactions to messaging and events.
- Each customer receives contextual communication. Eg, product knowledge for recently acquired customers or testimonials for those who are contemplating a purchase.
2. API Blocks
API blocks in journeys allow you to transfer real-time information, from WebEngage to your third-party systems (advertising, data-warehousing, live-chats, etc.) or your internal database.
An API is triggered if a customer clicks on the ‘Call back’ CTA mentioned in emails. The information is further relayed to the concerned teams at Edelweiss Tokio Life so that necessary actions can be taken. This action becomes the ‘conversion event’ for the campaign and helps in tracking its performance.
3. Exit Triggers for Journey Mapping
The primary goal of most marketing campaigns is to evoke a desired action from the users — ranging from getting users to read your new blog, avail special offers to watch a video, etc. Once the goal is accomplished, journey exit triggers can easily manage the user’s exit from the current journey, ensuring the user is engaged with campaigns that match his present actions.
The moment a customer clicks on an email, the ‘user attribute’ on WebEngage gets updated (e.g., a change from ‘Not interested’ to ‘Interested’) and the customer enters another journey. They are then nurtured as per the new journey’s communication strategy.
This journey mapping using exit triggers ensures:
- No redundant communication goes to customers
- Customers are nurtured as per their current disposition status
- Emails are hyper-personalized by leveraging real-time user data and behavioral data in the most optimal way.
Hyper-personalization: Real-time communication and hyper-personalization lay the foundation for delivering one-on-one messages to users. The way you track your user’s actions and preferences in your app and website play a crucial role. It fuels your personalization strategy — from personalizing a campaign’s message,images,links, and email attachments to using REST APIs to request data from your servers.
4. Campaign Performance Indicators
As users interact with the drip campaign, each interaction is tracked as a campaign eventor a performance indicator. This helps you toanalyze the campaign’s impacton userengagement, conversions, and revenue.
Data-driven messaging is one of the most scientific ways to deliver contextual experiences tailored to each user. Using the campaign performance indicators on the ‘Campaign Comparison’ screen, Edelweiss Tokio Life tracks data for all the communication in one clean view.
Splitting campaign performance by campaign events — clicks, conversions, revenue, etc. shows which campaign is providing the maximum impact. A sample overview is shown above (exact numbers have been changed).
These indicators help:
- Identify bottlenecks and key conversion steps
- See which campaign is giving the maximum impact
- Optimize user journeys further
The Results
Discover the astonishing results Edelweiss Tokio Life achieved with the help of the solutions mentioned above.
