Personalized transactional communication boosts engagement at Allianz Direct
Case study
Allianz Direct is one of the Netherlands’ largest online insurers, where you can easily arrange your home, car, or travel insurance independently. This insurer is continuously looking for ways to make everything even better, faster, and more efficient for its customers, aiming to provide a true wow experience. To achieve this, significant efforts have been put into marketing and communication. Over the past two years, substantial leaps forward have been made.
From a situation lacking insight into results and with tools misaligned to ambitions, Allianz Direct has transformed to a fully new content strategy, Salesforce migration, and personalized campaigns. This case takes you through this challenging process.
"By making smart use of our transactional data, we apply content automation & personalization to significantly enhance the customer experience."
– Stephanie van der Voort, Global CRM Lead at Allianz Direct
With the new content strategy, Allianz Direct aims to fully leverage transactional communication to increase engagement and eventually use it for marketing purposes. A transactional email is an automatically sent email related to a service or information, triggered by a specific customer action or event. These emails often have high open rates because customers expect and look forward to them. These messages significantly impact customer relationships by improving the customer experience and contributing to revenue generation
Key results
- Customer satisfaction for payment reminders increased from 3.1 to 3.7
- Unreceived payments reduced by 40%
- Consistent customer journey across all channels
- Cross-sell results – 14% higher conversion in A/B testing with personalized content banners
- Overall conversion rate increased by 10-15%
Case description
Allianz Direct sends approximately 2 million emails per month to a base of 2.2 million customers. In the old branding style, all these emails consisted of long copy, minimal visuals, and an inconsistent look and feel. One tool did not allow design customization, while another did but had limited data access. Data was scattered across various databases, resulting in an incomplete, fragmented customer view, making content personalization and optimization impossible.
Allianz Direct already had a clear vision and goals. Stephanie knew from past experience how to optimize transactional communication and what it would take to achieve this. Her vision and goals aligned perfectly with our approach. Once the current and desired situations were mapped out, a roadmap was created, breaking down the goals into manageable steps and phases. One major milestone was the migration to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. With this tool, information and data are centrally stored across all channels, essential for making data accessible for content personalization.
Allianz Direct employs 15 different transactional customer journeys. In addition to product-specific personalized content, there are 190 other email templates (non-personalized), resulting in extensive content managed by marketers across the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
This content strategy focuses purely on enhancing transactional communication. As an online insurer, service plays a critical role. Transactional communication is an important touchpoint, containing essential information a customer needs or expects to receive. These emails are often customer-triggered. Examples include renewal proposals, new policy documents after changes, or payment reminders. Unfortunately, these messages are often lengthy, unclear, or dull. Allianz Direct saw an opportunity to change this. With the right tools, internal marketing knowledge, design, data, and technology, Allianz Direct was able to make a difference for its customers.
The goal
Allianz Direct aims to strengthen customer loyalty through transactional communication. The various transactional journeys are optimized, with other journeys to follow. Transactional communication is as crucial as marketing, undergoing transformation to achieve outstanding results. Goals included clearer, more accessible personalized communication and increased conversions, all of which have been successfully achieved. Due to the success of personalized campaigns, this approach has been extended to commercial campaigns, including Loyalty & Cross-Sell.
The challenge
Allianz Direct is a fast-growing organization spread across five countries with different brands and products. One marketing challenge was keeping the vast range of products up-to-date in multiple languages. They wanted the new content strategy to ensure efficiency and uniformity. Additionally, the tools and strategies weren’t harmonized, and each country was at a different stage in the migration. This constant change makes implementing a clear marketing automation strategy challenging across the company. Despite this, Allianz Direct succeeded, expanding the marketing department from 2.5 to 14 marketers and creating a unified team working consistently across countries.
The content strategy
To develop a successful strategy, we started with a series of brainstorming sessions, during which we also explored how to apply learnings from e-commerce companies in the areas of marketing and transactional communication to improve our own transactional communication. The commercial and direct approach often used by e-commerce businesses is also well-suited for service providers. However, even e-commerce companies don’t always excel in these touchpoints with their customers. Therefore, the new content strategy had to be even more customer-focused and surpass the transactional communication standards of many e-commerce companies.
In addition to creating a new content strategy, it was also essential for Allianz Direct’s marketers to adopt a marketing automation mindset. We supported employees across various countries in learning how to implement marketing automation effectively. How do you craft a good transactional email? How do you utilize the data you collect? How do you reduce maintenance in your templates by making them more dynamic? By enhancing their knowledge of marketing automation, we were able to improve the overall quality of their campaigns.
The migration to Salesforce Marketing Cloud turned out to be a smart move. It enabled Allianz Direct to take control of many processes independently, while everything remains centralized. This allowed them to truly function as one unified team. But before reaching this point, we started from the very beginning.
Data and Technology
The first step was mapping the current marketing technology landscape, followed by the migration to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. With centralized data collection, campaigns could now be optimized through relevant personalization. Allianz Direct was eager to fully leverage this, delivering unique, engaging customer experiences. The first year focused on understanding and utilizing the new tool.
Allianz Direct collaborates with Skideo, specialists in personalized visuals (GIFs, videos, and images) and content automation. Skideo designed personalized, automated headers for Allianz Direct. With a dynamic data link, the system triggers a GIF or image generation at the time of sending. This real-time content generation ensures an optimal customer experience without requiring a developer or designer, saving time and costs
Personalized headers proved successful, leading Allianz Direct to expand this concept further. Besides connecting to external databases (like RDW data for car models), they also integrated Google Street View and AI for new campaigns. Allianz Direct’s campaigns are progressive and well-received by customers.
The results
Various transactional journeys have been optimized. The marketing team can now update all header images—look, feel, text, images, buttons, etc.—with a single click. Thanks to marketing automation, everything is now interconnected and centralized, enabling efficient collaboration across countries.
The payment journey
Imagine you haven’t paid your insurance premium (yet). In that case, you’ll receive a reminder email. To encourage more people to make their payment, a completely new look and feel was introduced in July 2023. Just like in commercial e-commerce, the recipient should immediately understand the purpose of the email and feel prompted to take action— in this case, paying their premium.
The header of the new reminder email clearly communicates why the email was sent, what action is required, and provides a button to make the payment instantly. Previously, customers received a reminder email and had to either manually transfer the outstanding amount or log in to their account to make the payment. The new email includes a direct payment link, making the process as easy as possible. The template is visually logical and structured so that recipients understand what to do within three seconds, resulting in a 10–15% increase in conversions.
An animation in the header adds a personal and lighthearted touch to the message. Additionally, SMS was integrated into the campaign. If the reminder email fails to reach the recipient, they receive an SMS prompting them to complete their payment. This ensures that Allianz Direct effectively connects with customers, delivering immediate results. As a result, overdue payments decreased by 40%, meaning nearly half of the outstanding amounts were paid, and these customers were retained.
The sentiment score (reflecting the recipient’s feelings) from Close Alert for this campaign improved from 3.1 to 3.6. Some customer feedback highlights include:
- “A great reminder for the payment!”
- “Nice graphics.”
- “Good and clear reminders. The button for direct payment is great—no need to log in to pay.”
The renewal journey
Another successful campaign focuses on auto insurance renewals. Personalizing the header with the renewal date and an image of the customer’s own car (color, model, brand) resulted in higher engagement. Using a dynamic content approach, the RDW database was used to accurately match the car details. Sentiment scores increased from 3.6 to 4.0, reflecting the campaign’s effectiveness.
In this email, the header immediately displays your renewal date alongside an image of your own car (matching its color, model, and make), so you instantly recognize which product and vehicle the message pertains to. Using your license plate information, we dynamically generate images of your car from various angles and in real-time. This isn’t pre-rendered; all customers see their car in the email simultaneously without delays.
For this campaign, dynamic content was utilized, and the correct car details are retrieved from the RDW database based on the license plate. Additionally, a connection with an automotive database allows for fetching and displaying accurate images of the car.
As a result, the Close Alert sentiment score for this campaign improved from 3.6 to 4.
The home insurance renewal campaign was also personalized. When the renewal date approaches, you automatically receive an email featuring your name, street name, and house number. The header includes animation, giving it a playful touch that avoids feeling intrusive. A unique feature of this header is that it adapts to the season. If your renewal occurs in the summer, the header reflects a summery theme; in the winter, it changes to a wintry atmosphere. For example, in winter, the front door is styled with seasonal décor to match the colder months.
The cross sell journey
Cross-sell campaign for customers with a car insurance
For Allianz Direct customers with auto insurance, a holiday-season cross-sell campaign was introduced. Personalized imagery showed the customer’s car alongside their home, styled as a festive snow globe. AI ensured an illustrative, inviting look. A/B testing revealed positive feedback, with no adverse sentiment from personalization and a 14% conversion increase.
What’s Next?
Allianz Direct is constantly evolving, with a roadmap to enhance journeys further. They aim to centralize content generation and expand into new channels, improve consistency, and add interactive email elements. Allianz Direct’s innovation focuses on enhancing customer experience, prioritizing solid foundations before advancing to predictive modeling. Future plans involve further automating communications through AI-driven triggers, continually optimizing to meet customer needs.
Interested in learning how to build a successful campaign? Contact our marketing automation specialists.