Making insurance Exciting:
Digital Advertisements
When I joined the Seven Corners travel insurance team in October of 2018, their advertisements had already been in the market for two years. In a two-month window, I rapidly educated myself about the travel insurance industry and their brand. During that time, I worked with the Senior UX/UI designer to create their brand guidelines which I used to guide my design of the multi-channel digital advertisements.
An external agency, EnvisionIt, developed the voice of the brand prior to me joining the Seven Corners team (see proprietary screenshots below).
I referenced the messaging above for the first set of 2019 advertisements below. The focus was on the fun of travel we wanted to reassure people to travel safely and learn about travel insurance. At the very core of the brand, they help keep people and their belongings safe when they’re traveling away from home.
The ads they had in the market from 2016 to 2018 were pretty flat, they didn’t have much diversity in type hierarchy or imagery and they weren’t using any patterns. I introduced the stripe pattern in the designs below and played with the emphasizing keywords within the ad copy, and tried out different styles of travel imagery ranging from adventurous to business travel and planning to travel.
Throughout 2019, we updated our ads if not every month, every other month. As soon as I sent off one campaign I was onto designing another one the next day.
We started with branded ads, then expanded to product-specific advertisements, followed by seasonal, then aspirational messaging, and lastly with reactive* ads.
*I defined reactive ads as a type of advertisement that was created in reaction to global travel news, which at the time (2019) some countries required travel insurance to gain entry.
↓ Below are ads from hurricane season, wave season (or the time of year when most people book cruises), and our aspirational Imagine all places you’ll go campaign (an ode to Dr. Seuss).
With each campaign, we focused heavily on prospective advertising using Google search key terms our Marketing Program Manager determined (which was our bread and butter prior to me joining). We used our agency partner, Sojern’s, travel-specific display network and sprinkled in some remarketing ads.
Some campaigns were run across all our channels: Bing, Facebook & Instagram, Gmail, YouTube and in our Terminus (Sigstr**) email signatures.
**The marketing team debuted Sigstr in January 2019, an email signature marketing tool, to increase awareness and drive traffic to campaign landing pages. By standardizing employee email signatures, Sigstr also helped reinforce the Seven Corners brand, build trust with new and potential customers who may not know us well, and promote consistent messages to our customers, external partners and fellow team members.
Between January 2019 and December 2020, the Sigstr ads I designed below brought in 50% of direct email revenue.
In 2019, I tested out a bunch of different illustration styles, and layouts for the brand. These ones below were images used in Facebook ads.
I was advised by the agency Sojern, that HTML5 display ads had a higher conversion rate than their static counterparts.
At that time I was not familiar with how to create and package them for display, so I took some time to teach myself. I determined that building them out in Google Web Designer would be the quickest route to create the first set of animated, HTML5 ads. To dip our feet in the water, we tested two programmatic display ad sizes in HTML5 format that had performed well with the static versions (300x250px and 728x90px).
Four weeks later, Sojern launched my HTML5 ads with a student travel insurance retargeting campaign (see below for 300x250px ad).
This was also the first advertising campaign we launched that included the mascot I developed, Sven the puffin.
I designed all the digital programmatic display and Facebook ads for Seven Corners in 2019. Although, each ad set went through a full-marketing team approval process due to sensitivity around legalities (what our insurance carriers allowed us to say) when selling their products. The Marketing Program Manager and Vice President of Market determined the seasonality or timing of their launch based on data they were seeing, and the team as a whole kept tabs on what competitors were doing so we could react to the market by pushing different advertising messages. Our team learned a lot from rapidly pushing out different messages while still remaining true to the heart of the brand in 2019.
We nearly doubled the digital advertising investment in 2019 compared to 2018.
Revenue attributed to our digital advertising grew +118% YoY
Digital advertising accounted for 47% of all direct to consumer revenue in 2019
AOV of digital advertising conversions was $202
2019 YTD ROAS = $5.86
Improved ROAS compared to 2018 by 14% … meaning we did not see a diminishing return by increasing ad spend by 98%
2019 ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) = 74%
2019 cost to acquire a new customer was reduced by -$3.83 compared to 2018
2019 improved ad CTR (click through rate) by 21% over 2018
2019 generated 154M ad impressions
Year over year (YoY) website traffic was UP 49% in 2019 over 2018. We use a number of methods to drive traffic to the website. Organic Search (first place) and Paid Social (second place) accounted for the highest percentage of website traffic.
In 2020, we decided to break up the campaigns by business quarters and focused more on product specific and reactive advertising. Below are general brand awareness, ARMOR road trip insurance and U.S. Expatriate medical insurance ads.
The first quarter of 2020 came in as the highest revenue quarter in the history* of the company! This was due to a significant investment by the leadership team in non-branded Google key terms & Facebook advertising.
The revenue accrued in 2020 Q1 from the Digital Advertising campaigns I designed, accounted for 14.5% of total 2020 revenue.
35.5% of total 2020 revenue was from Digital Marketing efforts (including Google SEM ads, social media ads & programmatic display and native advertisements)
*Seven Corners has been in business since 1993.
Then in Q2 (April) the COVID-19 pandemic hit the travel industry pretty hard. Travel had decreased 80% due to strict no travel restrictions. Needless to say this really made our team rethink the whole marketing strategy. We shifted our ad copy to err on the side of educational versus selling/being to salesy and focused more on remarketing over prospecting amid COVID-19 outbreak.
The ads below are a mix of programmatic display and social.
In May of 2020, we outsourced to another agency, Statwax, who took over our digital marketing efforts as well as the design of the advertisements.
At that time, I didn’t have the bandwidth to design the ads in a timely manner as I had the year prior because in February our team had been downsized so I had taken the responsibility of being the interim manager of our social media accounts.
My role shifted to being the Art Director of the advertisements that the Digital Designer on the Statwax team created.
I’m a fan of using puns and idioms whenever I can interject them in my work. In the ads below, I leaned into the age-old idiom ‘Hindsight is 20/20’, which was fitting considering no one was prepared for the year that 2020 threw at us. Note: I art directed this campaign but I didn’t design these social media ads.
In the spring of 2020, each state let alone each country had its own set of pandemic rules so we revived a 2019 ‘required countries campaign’, see below.
This year, I developed a new simplified standard for all our ad campaigns. I riffed off the visual language that the designer at Statwax created in 2020. This helped me rapidly create ads in reaction to the travel industry, which is constantly changing. All I need to do now is swap in ad copy from the Communications Specialist and imagery I choose from iStock. This new design eliminated trying to reinvent the wheel each time and focused solely on the messaging and the Seven Corners brand. The new templated design strips away brand confusion.
