DELA is the overall winner of the online orientation research into life insurance, conducted by WUA! in January 2016. Nancy Schuurmans is online marketing manager at DELA. A conversation about direct push marketing and content marketing, being relevant in the customer journey at the right moment, cultural changes, and making branding and online performance work hand in hand.
Congratulations, Nancy Schuurmans from DELA. You're the winner of this orientation research that focused on taking out life insurance from the perspective of potential customers. How important is it for you to be the best with DELA?
"When it comes to evaluation from the consumer's perspective, I find it really important. Consumers think we have the best product that fits their needs, in this case covering the death risk, often with the goal of taking out a mortgage, which I think is great to see."
Is the enormous focus on customer-centricity and customer satisfaction that we see in marketing departments nowadays actually something new: how is that at DELA?
"In essence, marketing should be marketing: working with the customer's needs in mind, focusing on the customer, and meeting the customer's needs. We now see a clear shift from product push to customer-focused marketing. At DELA we work very actively on this. Digitalization has increased the possibilities to be in contact with your customer. And from a consumer perspective, the customer has endless possibilities to get in contact with organizations and to search for the best fitting product or the best service. The challenge is to build a consistent brand experience in the digital playing field. The separation between offline and online marketing just doesn't help you to be customer-focused. You have to put the customer at the center, both offline and online. It's about the customer's question and context-specific answers: as a customer, if you ask a question on Facebook, you get a different answer than via email."
With a WPS score of 78, DELA is 10 points ahead of number two CentraalBeheer.nl in this research. What's going so well for you?
"I find that difficult to say. I know the organizations in the WUA! list, but I don't know how customers experience these companies. What I can say, more generally, is that we at DELA know better than anyone how annoying it is when things aren't sufficiently arranged at a (sudden) death. We are also funeral directors and handle 40,000 funerals per year. At DELA it's about arranging things for when you're no longer there. That's what funeral insurance is for, but also life insurance. Service about how you put things in a will, the things that have to do with inheritance and guardianship over children. Every day we realize how precious life is. Because it ends. And because it is passed on. In daily practice, our funeral directors and advisors for survivors encounter all kinds of situations where things are well arranged, or just poorly arranged. Our experience shows how important it is to think about later early on. And we help people with that."
How do you view service in relation to sales? Could service ultimately become the new sales in the insurance sector?
"We're going from a product-focused approach to a content-driven approach. We increasingly work from a content strategy that is fed by brand positioning and customer insights. We determine themes for groups of people, and based on these themes we create stories that enable us to provide relevant implementation of different touchpoints. We do this by researching beforehand, to the best of our ability, what information people need and how and when they use it. That sounds simple, but for DELA this is a significant change within marketing. DELA was a direct marketing organization that pushes insurance products to the market. But now we ask ourselves: When is it relevant to say something, at what moment do we have something to offer? Can we provide service? At what point would it be better to just stay quiet for a moment?"
"Because: we're not always relevant, that's just how it is. We're seen as a brand that's linked to death. An example. When you're young, say 18 years old, you're much less concerned with topics like funerals. It's a challenge for DELA to make contact with young people early on, so they know what products and services DELA has to offer, and have a good feeling about us, should the topic become relevant at a later stage in their lives. Another example. If you have children, it's relevant to discuss guardianship at some point, or to add your child to your funeral insurance. But do you think women who are pregnant want to have a conversation with DELA at that moment? Does that fit within their journey at that exact moment? Of course not. They're busy with life, and new life. In that case, we might be more relevant at a later time."
"We're shaping the marketing organization based on this example. Integrating offline and online marketing. Besides the performance marketing campaigns, online branding gets more substance through content marketing, for example. The challenge now is to bring offline branding and online performance together, and we want to do this in a content-driven way. The way you get people through the sales funnel is always a combination of marketing and branding. E-commerce sits at the bottom of the funnel and plays a big role, but you have to connect these tactics without pushing a product. Three years ago we needed a social strategy, that's already being phased out. We need a context-specific approach for different touchpoints. But there must be consistency."
What is the role of customer research and customer focus in your daily work?
"It plays a huge role. At website level, we've been doing usability research for years. We participated in the WUA! research, we work with Vals Plat for usability. We recently started with reviews on DELA.nl, and we also use Usabilla. Everything we do that has to do with the process of arranging a funeral is subsequently subjected to a customer satisfaction survey, so we also check the NPS. So we have many sources, marketing also listens to the call center, and we regularly conduct panel research. DELA has a collaboration panel for members, and we have frequent conversations with customers."
"Furthermore, we're more focused on the customer on a project basis. We have an intern doing an analysis of the youth segment. This segment doesn't even know us, and doesn't want anything to do with us. That only really happens when they're confronted with a death, close to them. We're now looking at how we can build a relationship with this group, without talking about our products. On Instagram for example, we're now looking at what we could do there from the DELA brand."
What is your biggest digital challenge?
"The integration of online and offline. This is an organizational challenge, but also regarding the implementation of marketing. You should always think and act from journeys, not from channels. If it's specifically about online marketing, my biggest challenge is to combine offline and online branding performance. How do you do that from a customer journey perspective with a logical connection from funnel thinking, with relevant content."
"A very concrete part of that is creating and rendering from your own content hub. Dela.nl is primarily an informational website. Here people should be able to find specific information, and should be able to arrange things like taking out insurance. The WatJeMeegeeft.nl platform offers much more inspiration. We want to offer consumers a softer landing through pull content. People are then invited, from that environment, to talk with others on the forum about topics around life and death that they're dealing with. Another challenge is the distribution of content. I see quite a few possibilities to place content in a relevant way via partners. At the moment we're working with Gezondheidsplein, for example. There we offer content about wills and guardianship. Giving valuable information at a relevant moment in a customer journey, that's what we're looking for. Other platforms besides our own channels can play an important role in that."
Are there cool things in the works, what digital innovations are you working on?
"We're working on digitalizing the funeral arrangement process. That way people have more control over the process, they can arrange and share more things remotely. Actually that's what people want: an online environment to organize everything as much as possible themselves. Furthermore, we went live a few months ago with a forum where we facilitate people to talk with each other about issues concerning life and death. Suicide is a topic there, natural burial, organ donation, donating your body to science, everything is covered. This forum is not only for members, it's open to everyone. Come and take a look."
Recent WUA! winner interviews
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Angela Havenaar (Customer Journey Expert, ING) – Read the interview here
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Edouard Rekko (CCO Fietsenwinkel.nl) – Read the interview here
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Rob van Beers (Online Manager DAS) – Read the interview here
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Martin de Boer (CMO Corendon.nl) – Read the interview here
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Jeroen Oosterbaan (CMO Simyo) – Read the interview here
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Peter Sonke (Director Online Sales KPN) – Read the interview here
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Ivonne Doornebos (CCO ANWB) – Read the interview here
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Nils Vergeer (Head Online CZ) – Read the interview here
