The Grow Your Retirement campaign offered retirement-planning assistance to policyholders after COUNTRY added financial services to their property/casualty offerings.
Every part of this piece is a custom illustration, no stock art was used.
Audience:
Policyholders of COUNTRY agents qualified to sell mutual funds.
Additionally screened by:
• Having auto and property insurance with COUNTRY
• Age 35-55
• Don’t have an appointment already scheduled
Objectives:
1) Heighten awareness among policyholders that
COUNTRY also offers financial services
2) Elicit a meeting request
Offer:
A meeting to cover all aspects of their financial situation and
relieve worry about financial security in retirement.
Creative Strategy:
Entice policyholders to schedule an Insurance and Financial Review, something many know they should do, but don’t.
In the market, we were competing with:
A) letter packages with inserts (brochure, age/financial charts, fact sheet with alarming statistics) or B) self-mailers with photogenic seniors enjoying a well-dressed leisure. The drawback to these approaches is they’re wholly interchangeable: any company can send a package like that and put a logo on it – but what’s the differentiator?
I thought of this concept during the kick-off meeting with our client and asked if something like this would even be entertained, brand-wise. They liked it immediately. Certainly a “money growing on trees” theme has been used by other marketers but not (we believed) in the way we intended.
We planned to emulate a vintage, custom-illustrated watercolor seed packet with gardening tools symbolizing the concept/copy and had some fun with pseudo-botanical nomenclature (Investus Ingenious) . And, the policyholder would feel right away, something “lumpy” inside — five pennies in a small “seed bag” as starter seeds to grow their retirement.
Interesting tidbit:
After gaining approval from USPS to mail pennies in our package, we never expected the 150,000 pennies to be delivered by an armored truck.
Results:
• International DMA ECHO winner: The only marketing competition to judge the importance and effectiveness of Creativity, Innovation and Results.
• 79% of eligible agents participated in the campaign,
exceeding client's goal by 29%
• Over 2,100 new policies were sold, exceeding client's goal by 166%
• 7.2% sales conversion rate,
approximately twice the average for past mailings
ROI (provided by client):
Year 1: 576%
Year 5 (projected): 1118%
This piece was also highlighted as a two-page
feature story in the USPS’s Deliver Magazine (last photo above).
