The Brief

Direct Line’s typical strategy, alongside other insurers, has always been to target prospects when they were due for a renewal and therefore in the market for insurance. But this relies heavily on hand raisers and ignores a whole raft of individuals – people who haven’t got insurance in the first place.

We discovered that under-insuring is as much an emotional behaviour as it is rational. Some people don’t feel that they have a lot (even though they might have games consoles, bikes, laptops etc.) or they don’t feel a huge emotional attachment to the things they do have.

We recognised we needed to make people not only think but feel differently about their contents and insuring them. 

The Eureka Moment

We started to think about triggers that might tug on the latent emotional drivers that underpin insurance purchases. There is a self-evident truth that people feel more protective over their belongings immediately after purchase.

With sales periods such as Black Friday and January Sales fuelling big ticket purchases across the UK, these events provided a large-scale opportunity to hijack cultural triggers when we knew people were buying new items, in a moment when we knew they’d be feeling an emotional connection with them.

We created ‘Red Saturday’, an event to complement rather than compete with Black Friday, forming an instant connection with the Direct Line brand.

The Roll-out

We planted the seed the week before, targeting the uninsured via email; a channel we knew they’d be looking at in the lead up to sales. A subsequent email sent on Red Saturday itself (the day after Black Friday) using targeted creative for opened/non-opener segments, highlighted risks to new purchases, picturing shattered TVs and laptops. Twitter ads supported the message, targeting recent device upgrades to really hit our intended audience. A bold website banner then converted the traffic we’d driven there.

We repeated this strategy in January, with emails highlighting both the value of recent purchases and Christmas gifts. In true sales season spirit, we also drove awareness of the ongoing 20% online discount to clinch the deal..

Results

The campaign exceeded expectations, both in the first iteration of Red Saturday, and January Sales, throughout the sales funnel.

 The combined campaigns resulted in: