SafeAuto: In Less Than 12 Months, Online Advertising Grows Policy Base by 33%

SafeAuto Insurance Company, one of the nation’s leading car insurance companies, is certainly no stranger to advertising—in fact, television, radio and print ads have served as the company’s marketing mainstay since it began in 1993. But when Elie Deshe joined the company in 2006, and last year became its Director of Emerging Media and Event Marketing, he realized very quickly that unlike the company’s traditional advertising programs that were fully entrenched, he would have the opportunity to build the company’s online programs from the ground up.

“When I joined the company, our web site didn’t have quoting capabilities,” said Elie. “So my first task was to help get that set up. After the quoting was in place, it was time to see how we could go about driving more traffic to the site and using it as a tool to sell policies. We started researching potential partners and found ClearSaleing—and it turned out that they had a great product. But we needed a company to help us place ads, not just track them after they were running. ClearSaleing in turn introduced us to their online ad buying partner Clarecast, and our three companies began working together.”

Impressive Results within Months

Within months of beginning their business relationship with ClearSaleing, SafeAuto was already seeing impressive results. “It took just a few months before our online advertising reached a steady point where we had a firm grasp on what was working and what wasn’t. If you go way back to when we first started online advertising on our own, ClearSaleing and Clarecast have helped us reduce our online cost per policy acquisition by something like 500%! A more down-to-earth way to explain it is this—in less than a year, online advertising now accounts for a full 1/3 of our online policies issued.”

Lower Customer Acquisition Costs and Faster Market Penetration

ClearSaleing is also helping SafeAuto lower customer acquisition costs. “Let me give you an example of how powerful ClearSaleing is. Though we have a presence in other states, it’s only recently that we’ve begun writing policies in Texas. Within weeks of placing and tracking our first online ads targeting the state, Texas is now the single largest state in terms of quotes, policies issued and closing percentages.”

“In the past, we would have had to invest huge sums doing television and radio to launch in a new state. Working with ClearSaleing, we’re finding that we can become profitable more quickly. We believe that our customer acquisition costs are going down as a direct result of what we’re doing online,” Elie noted.

“We Know Immediately if our Ad Choices are Profitable”

One of the things Elie appreciates about the ClearSaleing platform is the freedom it gives he and his team to try something new. “ClearSaleing really allows you to take chances and experiment. In the beginning, we started with banner ads, then with Google AdWords. Since then, we’ve added a few other channels like InsWeb, the Internet Yellow Pages, DMV.org and others—we’re always challenging ourselves to find a new way to reach our audience. It’s great to be able to try something and then sit back and see—will it bring in 100 hits that turn into 5 policies or 50 hits that turn into 10 policies? Thanks to ClearSaleing we know immediately if our ad choices are profitable. We then work with Clarecast to optimize the ads that aren’t as lucrative.”

Stellar Service Makes Implementation Easy

Another area where ClearSaleing clearly rises above and beyond is in the area of service and technical expertise. “We have our own proprietary in-house system that runs our quoting engine and other functionality within the company,” explained Elie. “ClearSaleing’s technicians were able to connect into our system and cull the information that the program needed, without causing us IT headaches or downtime—which in my mind was one of the biggest challenges we faced. From a service perspective, the platform just does what it’s supposed to do, and we couldn’t be happier about that.”

A Web Budget that Continues to Grow

ClearSaleing also makes it easier for Elie to justify a growing online advertising budget. “At this point, the amount of money we’re budgeting for web spending will only continue to grow, and one of the reasons behind that is that ClearSaleing makes it so easy for us to pinpoint exactly how our ads are contributing to new policies. I don’t see our online ad spend going anywhere but up.”

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Case Studies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.