2018 Silver Health and wellness

Entrant: Paragon Customer Communications

Client: Bupa

Campaign name: First Year "My Bupa" Email Journey

Campaign overview

Delivering healthy retention rates with brilliant insight

The brief

Helping Bupa build better customer engagement for private medical policies

Strategy

Having helped Bupa deliver a welcome journey programme for private medical insurance customers in 2016, Paragon set out to improve customer engagement, reduce churn and build brand advocates. Creating a seamless customer journey, from policy sign-ups to annual renewals and beyond, while catering to a diverse audience, was key.

Internal stakeholder workshops were the starting point, reviewing the existing strategy and competitors.
Email and content strategy came under the microscope, resulting in five priority areas, from segmentation to
personalisation. A whole new data strategy underpinned engaging communications, with output data fed back into campaigns.

Creativity

The new segmentation showed different audiences had varying value, churn risk, tenure and demographic characteristics. The creative approach required personalised content triggered by customer actions and interests, and driven by technology.

IBM Watson played a critical role in the campaign. The data it generated provided central intelligence for a winning strategy. The trigger logic process gave Bupa the opportunity to cross-sell products to their members based on click-stream data from emails.

In turn, this resulted in product emails on GP appointments, elderly care, dental treatment and other relevant
subjects delivered to the customer at staggered intervals, adding real value to communications.

Results

The campaign was hailed a huge success, driving down lapse rates by 7% and increasing retention rates by 8% among target customers.

The insight and strategy greatly improved the effectiveness of Bupa’s communications by helping to optimise the customer journey through much-improved targeting, content and messaging.

Team

Paragon Customer Communications - Peter Toole, Strategic Relationship Director - Clare Breakspear, Head of Planning - Emily Jackson