Travel insurance conversions increased by 167 %

The challenge

A major insurance company couldn’t wrap their heads around their travel insurance. When compared with the competition, it was objectively great value. And what’s more, customers got the first year of insurance for free.

On paper, it looked like a no-brainer. The weird thing was, it didn’t translate into sales. And as is usually the case, it was up to us to find the catch.

The approach

We needed to dig deep into what possible barriers might be deterring the customers. To do that, we looked at:

1. the campaign emails,
2. the data on conversion rates of different emails, and
3. the most common reasons given to the call center for why customers did not want the insurance.

As a second step, we conducted research on about 1,000 of the company’s customers. We showed these customers the campaign emails and asked them whether there was anything they were uncertain about.

The original email

The solution

Removing uncertainties

The main barrier we found was uncertainty about auto-renewal. People were simply worried that in the event they didn’t want the insurance after the free year, they would forget to cancel it.

The original email did not address this uncertainty at all.

Another barrier was the lack of information on the amount of insurance coverage. Customers didn’t know how much they would be covered if something bad happened to them.

We designed a new message to address both of these barriers. The most important part was to give customers peace of mind. We assured them that before the free year ended, we would notify them. This way, they could cancel the insurance before the next payment.

Social proof

We also combined information about the insurance coverage with social proof. This key behavioral principle taps into our innate tendency to mimic what others are doing.

To achieve this, we picked the most common risks customers usually choose to cover. Then we added the insurance coverage for “all the most frequently purchased coverage plans for your trips around the world”.

The results: 167% increase in conversions

After implementing these steps, we A/B tested the new email with the old one. And the results? A whopping 167% increase in conversions.