2016 Bronze Best use of Door Drops

Client Royal London

Campaign summary

Complex financial products even an 11 year old could understand

Campaign overview

Royal London needed to profitably communicate to their target audience in a simple way to ensure their understanding of a complex financial product.

And they needed to be able to operate at scale, with a cost per acquisition challenge. Previous door drop campaigns had run at a very inefficient cost per acquisition and in order to at least breakeven, this needed to reduce by at least 40%.

Strategy

To reduce the CPA by over 40% three fundamental changes were made: improved targeting, a message that worked harder and reduced production and distribution costs.

The segments focused on UK households with a propensity to buy Royal London’s product, with a simplified language because half of UK 60 year olds have a reading age of 11.

They added comparative advertising as an incentive to reduce procrastination and reduced the cost of producing and distributing door drops.

They shopped around for more competitive print costs, and used Royal Mail incentive schemes to bring down the cost of delivery. The campaign outperformed expectations, and cross media analysis highlighted that the targeted door drop campaign helped boost direct mail response by 38% further supporting the strength of the new targeting model.

Creativity

The campaign integrated Victorian-style art direction and illustration with messages in ALT and BTL campaigns. Over 50s are more likely to take the time to read door drops and respond if they’re relevant.

Royal London tested consumers’ understanding of complex financial products, along with their interpretation of varying explanations. Product features and benefits, and perceived comparison to the market leader, were evaluated for importance to work out messaging hierarchy.

These learnings, and awareness of the average 11 year old reading age for much of the audience, were applied to all pieces in the ATL and BTL campaigns - including door drops. Also, a money-related incentive that was previously tested in other media with success was added to help spur action. This resulted in a creative with more effective design and art direction, less copy but more benefit-led propositions, easier to understand and staggered calls to action, as well as links to prompt further reading.

Results

Sales converted over the phone more than doubled - from 11% to 28%.

And sales resulting from those who requested an enquiry pack more than trebled - from 4% to 13%.

Propensity modelling successfully identified those most likely to buy, and research helped identify the benefits that were most important to the audience, as well as highlighting language that was confusing and generally inhibited reading and understanding of the information.

Team

David Meliveo (Head of Marketing Promotions) • Marta Gonzalez (Acquisition Marketing Lead) • Malcolm Torrance (Data & Marketing science Lead) • Alix Saunders (Marketing Manager) • Tim Diviny (Copywriter)

Contributors

Elmtree Creative (Design- art direction and production) Mediavest (Media buying) Whistl (Targeting modelling)